In Pedo Impedimenta
by PurveyorofPulchritude
Summary: "But profoundly poignant prove the tawny knots of the womb-webb'd elves to the lonely scribe."
1. Prologue

**In Pedo Impedimenta**

or

**In Soil Stymied**

Prologue

Jon Urfe was a man entangled. If the spark of a normal man's life is a thread woven through time, Jon's life was a series of snarls so snagged and twisted around the lives of others as to make it nearly impossible to tell where his life ended and theirs began; one tangle after another, knots upon webs upon snags on and on through time's watery warp, flailing and twitching and rattling the straightlaced throng of mortality with his every move - and inseparably subject to their manipulations, as well. A string of invisible knots in the fabric of normal mortal history, was Jon's life, and without rival when it came to indissolubility. The first, tightest, and most simplistic of all of Jon's knots had been tied early, by a single stumble in a single field in a single piercing moment - and in this way Jon went on, stumbling through his life and tangling himself ever more tightly in knots of ever more complex and bewildering associations. There he is in the market of sordid Bravil, just a single snarl yet to mar the line of his history, and then - slam! his face hits the ground of fate once more as a down-on-his-luck Khajiit warlock wraps the eleven-year-old Jon's head in Ta'agra, the language of his people, and the boy's mind is made the eternal slave of linguistics; pow! at twelve he has bought his first book - a decrepit primer to the language of the Altmer - and twines the written word through the auburn curls atop his skull; bam! once more the ground, for three months later an acolyte of the Synod has tripped him into the splintered paving stones of the Imperial City for making 'corrections above his station,' and the sympathetic priest-mage looking on has taught him an arcane chant to stitch the lips of adversaries; boom! and, sixteen, his stumbling, amateur spellwork has wrapped his parents' farm in a mangle of docile but vigorously mating tree-serpents, and there is the emissary of the College of Whispers to untie his aetherial knots and to bundle the prodigy off for a proper education in the College's main Cynosure.

Again and again, knot after knot, Jon tangled himself ever deeper in the world. There he is in the College's archives, stumbling into myths of creation, being tied up in Lorkhans and Auriels, Sithises and Anus, Shors and Alduins, and falling quite helplessly through the doors of who-is-who, and quite nearly strangling himself in questions of identity; there he is in the studies of his professors, wrapped up in hero worship and advanced conceptual flow theory; there he is in the beds of his female peers (and at least one of his professors), quite functionally immobilized in downy limbs and the tangles of silky soft locks. There was no such word as 'untie,' for Jon; the only way to get him out of one thing was to bind him up more tightly in something else - the primary instrument in such an endeavor being, naturally, the same insatiable curiousity and desire to understand that he was so wont to profess and that would one day lead to his qualification for and subsequent appointment to the position of Specialist in Poly-Spectral Comprehension Techniques and Phenomena, and to all the rights, benefits, amenities, and liabilities that that post implies. For knowledge is a pursuit with an End, for those few who think they pursue it and are correct in the belief, while understanding is an endeavor of eternal internal unfolding by its very unattainability.

But for all that - all our entangled man's irrepressible bumbling and stumbling along through his life, all his uncanny skill with language and sometimes unnerving psychosympathy - to Tamriel at large, his was not such an extraordinary life. So he had been born to parents whose experience of magic was limited, in essence, to the thrill they felt between their toes as they walked the neatly tilled rows of tidy corn or bronzing wheat in Cyrodiil's sweltering summers - it was a tumultuous time in Tamriel (although, in truth, what time is not, in the Arena?) and there was plenty of movement through the social stratosphere, and plenty of educated sorcerers like Urfe, whose parents had as muddied an understanding of the concept of reading as they did of the nature of creation; it was no cause for shame. To his colleagues in the starry halls of the Miscarcand Cynosure, Urfe was just one more quirky wizard among many; just the bumbling arcane linguistics professor who had a finger in everyone's research, a toe in the businesses of half the province's travelling merchants and mendicant thespians, and his warm, embracing arms in the lives of everyone he met; just the hopeless sap always fell for the scams of the Imperial City's con men and mer - though the Eight _knew _that a man like that should be able to tell when he was being swindled. He was the voice of the College in those years, as well; the Whisper incarnate. He was the one sent on outreach to the intellectual establishments of other provinces, to ply his polylingual tongue in soft sibilance toward the establishment of mutually beneficial relationships with the College; he it was who padded through the stacks of the College of Winterhold's Arcaneum, quoting pig-verse to the librarian and quietly pilfering that other College's only copy of the Five Hundred Hull-Histories; he it was that tracked down the elusive University of Gwylim from its puzzle bound antiquity sphere and wooed away its youngest scion; he it was that befriended the Khalm'e'Khakh of Elsweyr, the migratory mirage school of the Khajiit; he it was that braved the wastes of Morrowind in pursuit of the rumored remnants of the legendary mushroom mages - but there he found only ash, ash and the sloughed skins of nematodes unprecedented in their bulk. And wherever he went, he went with the native flavor on his tongue, weaving the people's own national sound through their ears.

He was not the only Whisperer the College possessed, of course - indeed, he made none of his expeditions unassisted - but he was among the most skilled. And so it was that when the Aldmeri Dominion approached the College of Whispers with a proposal for academic intercourse with one of Alinor's most respected intellectual institutions, Jon Urfe was _not _immediately dispatched to the island of the elves. At peace the Empire and the Dominion were, but the war that had divided them was yet fresh in the minds of all; the College would not risk one of their best among the sheer-nosed Altmer until it was at least reasonably certain that out-and-out torture and interrogation of ambassadors was outside of the Thalmor's - the ruling body's - immediate inclinations. Only once it had been well established that the isle Alinor was safe -for the skilled and conscientious of invited guests - was Jon allowed to tangle himself up in the project, to fret and stew and fantasize over the trials and wonders he would experience as one of the privileged few humans ever to see the fabled Altmeri homeland with his own eyes, to obsess over elven Declensions and the intricacies of Aldmeris' Infinitives, over Participles and Pronouns and Genetives and all the other jewels of linguistic technicality in his hoard of comprehension spectra, and to mist his eyes with the beauty of the words that would win yet another people to him and open their hearts to his understanding. He would delve to depths of the elven psyche hitherto untraversed by man; he would elucidate the inner workings of High Elven magic and lay them at the feet of the Emperor; he would reconcile the races and bind the Aldmeri Dominion to the Empire in inextricable profundity. It would be his crowning achievement, his most glorious challenge yet. And he would succeed. For it was this for which he had been born.

No surprise, then, that the Jon Urfe that left the city of Alinor's parallel-spiraling spires, the Jon Urfe who had months of elven arrogance and condescending indifference and more than enough rebuttals to stick in his craw was not the open, dewey-eyed, broad-grinned fellow he had been before his arrival, not the Jon Urfe of forgiveness and boundless understanding compassion for the fallacies of mortals he had been through all the rest of his travels. No - this was a Jon Urfe who sat the sea-silk sling seat of the Thalmor's low-slung carriage shell with an attitude of epitomous disdain worthy of the best of his acquaintances in thespianry. This was the Jon Urfe who had stood silently erect in the dark stoop of an Alinorian doorway, black portmanteau dangling from his thick fingers, as the dark conveyance had slunk up in its leopard slick way behind its quartet of cat-nimble grey geldings out of the refractional labyrinth of the city, the Jon Urfe who had sneered as the vehicle slid to a stop before him. This was the Jon Urfe who had nodded with the coldest of brevities up at the amused Thalmor clerk the vehicle vomited from its smooth side before stepping past that straight-robed elf and into the dark shallowness of his vessel. This was the stone-jawed Jon Urfe who crossed his arms and pulled his emerald silk robes tight across his stout chest, staring rigidly out through the narrow window strips that pierced carriage's long sides like gills. And this was the Jon Urfe whose mind hummed away as the thousand bedazzling hues of the city sped past them beyond the grey veil of the screen, clicking and ticking out his next report to the Assemblage of Provincial Oversight hundreds of miles and an ocean away, safe and secure from the rudely humbling superiority of the Altmer in the dimly glowing halls of their College.

But first, its precedent.


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter I**

Dispatch to the Assemblage of Provincial Oversight  
College of Whispers, Miscarcand Cynosure  
Dynamistographic Transcription of Urfe's Seventh Harmonic Spectra-Sphere  
Date: 13 Second Seed, 4E XXX

Perhaps least well known and most under-appreciated of all the myriad intricacies of traditional Altmeri thaumaturgy is that of the edaphomancer, or soil sorcerer. Indeed, despite the foundation of intellectual voracity I share with so many of my colleagues and the recent establishment of scholastic embassy between our College and Alinor's School of Thoughts and Calculations, I had never encountered the term, in all my research, until our parallel-purloined Thalmori clerk-overseer placed a perfunctory pamphlet on the topic in my hands and informed me that this would henceforth be my area of occupation. I have read, in all their angst-tempered effervescence, the reports of the previous Collegiate Ambassadors after their returns to Cyrodiil; I have seen the fantastic accounts of magisters of infinities both con- and divergent, of the lachrymosaic masterpieces of the temporal excavationists, of thaumatovestors and pearlescent chronographers and clepsydrics; but in all of that incredible deluge, not one reference have I seen to the existence of agronomic sorcery in the isle of the Altmer or its corollaries. Still – according, at least, to the brief brochure I peruse as I etch this report – it _does _exist, and has from the Dawn and the beginning of linearly recorded history.

But it is not so surprising that the knowledge of the existence of an entire school of magical technique has eluded Cyrodiilic wizards – well, all human practitioners, I suppose, when it comes down to it – for so long. Consider the foundation of widespread professional magical study in mainland Tamriel; our predecessors in the Mages Guild. Galerion did indeed study in the land of the Altmer, but he did so in the demesne of the Psijiic Order – and they are mystics; little given to concern with the more practical aspects of magic. However much more prone toward applicative magic Galerion's approach may possibly have been, he was still known as 'the Mystic' – and so it is but to be expected that both the College of Whispers and our rivals, the Synod, like the Mages Guild our common ancestor, deal but little with what one might call 'earth' magic. We concern ourselves with higher quandaries than the fulfillment of basic human needs - with the nature of our world and its manipulation, with the why and how of creation; where did it all come from, and where is it going? How to eke out a few more bushels of grain from the same plot of mediocre land is a question we leave to those less intellectually bestowed – and rightly so. It is much the same in Alinor.

It cannot be denied, however, that agronomic magicks – 'earth' magicks – do exist, both in Alinor and in Cyrodiil, and – we can assume – throughout Tamriel. I can speak personally for the Heartlands of the Empire, as my parents – even now that my position provides them with income ample enough to live more suitably to their son's station – still maintain their speck of a farm in the rusty soil of south-central Cyrodiil. They, along with most of their neighbors, do indeed utilize sorcerous practices in their management; insect specific wards along field margins, incremental cold treatments to harden off seedlings for transplant, heat sterilization of the soil, limited imparted disease resistance, etc., etc. Their techniques are so crude and uncouth, so inefficient and of such limited effectiveness that I hesitate even to name what they do as 'spellcraft;' it is inferior even to the efforts of the least skilled of the bungler Synod's acolytes. I detect much the same attitude as I have evinced toward the 'soil sorcerers' of humanity from the Altmer toward their own earthy embarrassments; they write of these 'edaphomancers' with a contempt that is veiled in window silk, when it is veiled at all. There can be no doubt that the Thalmor behind my assignation intend it as an insult and assumed me incapable of detecting the slight in their words; for this pamphlet is written in old Aldmeris, of all things. But I am not the College of Whispers' premier specialist in poly-spectral comprehension for nothing, and this latest insult was as clear to me as all its precedents. The Dominion may have opened the shores of Alinor for the first time in centuries to honor our scholastic partnership with their institutions, but neither that nor the peace brokered by the White-Gold Concordat has lessened their elvish arrogance a single whisker; the citizens of the Skeining City barely acknowledge our existence in their own self-absorption, the Thalmor and their lackeys in the nobility insult us with impunity, and the scholars with whom we are _supposed _to be collaborating do not even seem to realize that they have guests. It is enough to make one wonder _why, _exactly, the School of Thoughts and Calculations even extended its offer to the College in the first place.

For, truly: the Dominion invites us to their homeland, mouthing lulling words of diversity and the inclusion of cultural variability – and when our ambassadors arrive in the isle of the elves, they are shut away for months at time in the bowels of the capital, to rot in idleness and isolation, doing nothing but feeding our own frustration and angst with the situation. They respond to our requests for excursion days late, if ever – and until today, always negatively, citing delays from their desire to provide us with the best possible experience in their nation. But when finally they do dispatch one of us, to what sect is he – am _I – _sent? To that of least possible respect in the eyes of intelligent Altmeri society; to a group of parlor wizards who are - no doubt - more respectable and honorable than their more culturally refined overlords, but who are held in contempt by even the laymen magicians of the cities, to a cult of 'sorcerers' that refuses footwear in order to maintain a 'connection to Nirn,' or some similar superstitious nonsense. One can hope that they possess more skill than the average Cyrodiilic 'dirt' mage – being, after all is through, Altmer, and inherently given to magic – and they have, apparently, the advantage of organization over their human counterparts – in Cyrodiil, this type of magic is passed down based solely on heredity; no farmer has the slightest inkling what 'spells' his neighbors are casting – but the bald insult remains as intended; in a land of unparalleled magical skill, in the very birthplace of professional spellcraft, I have been assigned to study the practices of the most simplistic field possible, the most basic fundamental there is: the magic of dirt.

It is the crowning insult to the hundreds the _High Elven _people have issued in the months since my arrival in the College's 'embassy.' I can only hope that some, at least, of the as yet unassigned ambassadors (Odfrin, please and thank you, Mara) will be directed to join me in this agricultural purgatory, that we may, together, cope with Alinor the country as we have with Alinor the city; by cleaving ever tighter to each other, human to human, in spitting spite of elvish disregard. The Thalmor clerk, Lorund, who brought my dispatch earlier today, hinted that decisions had yet to be finalized for the others. With luck, the damned elves will make up their minds before I leave, so that, at the very least, I will be able to pass along the information of their locations. I am the only one here still able to communicate with you in Miscarcand, after all – as you are, of course, aware. For now, there is little for me to do besides brood and pack my few possessions – not that there has ever been much with which were allowed to occupy ourselves in the accursed twisted city outside these chambers. By the Eight, but I had better have some company in this journey, or I swear these damned elves…

… my apologies to the Assemblage. In the heat of my ire, my thoughts have veered from the thread of my report. I am here to increase the College's stores of knowledge, not to weave petty tales of elven injustice to men; that is well established. Were the mechanisms of dreamsleeveish transmission not long lost in the rubble of the Arcane University, I would request the above passages expunged from the records – but, alas, it is, and my dynamistograph has no such capability. The Assemblage will simply have to endure the transcript as it stands, with my apologies.

To return to the true purpose of this report: edaphomancy. Perhaps I should begin with a clarification, as my emotions may have skewed the Assemblage's perception of the topic thus far. While I do doubt that Alinor's soil sorcerers possess the capability to advance the knowledge of the College much, if at all, I do have hopes that they will exhibit some capacity for intellectual discussion and theoretical discussion of more esoteric magical topics above what we would expect from the characteristic human 'dirt magician;' and if this is the case, it may be that they will prove a more valuable resource than some of the true masters of Altmeri sorcery, if only because the (supposed) agricultural simplicity of their nature will preclude the guile and reticence of the more intelligent and allow the extraction of more detailed comprehension spectra. That notwithstanding, perhaps this report may have some value of its own – perhaps it may prove of some small use to some young apprentice for some trivial essay in some distant future. One can only hope.

As strange as it may sound to us in the Fourth Era, having been exposed only to the wondrous face of High Elven militant magnuscience and the dark glamour of the Emperor's Thalmor ambassadors, agriculture is, in fact, the primary occupation of a large segment of Altmeri society. It would have struck our ancestors of past Empires just as strangely, no doubt, as Alinor – or Summerset, as the isle was known as a province – was always among the least humanly-frequented regions of Tamriel, even when under Imperial rule – but the fact was just as true then as now. And for all that time, soil sorcery has been the heart of agriculture in the heartland of the Altmer. The '_Kemendelia,' _they name themselves – 'soil offering,' in Aldmeris. They are – from what I can tell so far with the information I have been given – regarded as an exceedingly backward bunch by most of society, spurning the company of almost all outside of the agronomic sphere, even disdaining the formal education system which provides a unifying thread through each caste of Altmeri society. Instead, the Kemendelia recruits and trains its members – whether destined for edaphomancy or some other discipline of agricultural magic – independently, and usually on a hereditary basis. Yet again we see that, irregardless of their purported ancestry, inherent arrogance, and 'ears of great stature,' elves differ little, except superficially, from the races of men; in Alinor, as everywhere else on Tamriel, the foundation of an individual's life almost always dictates the form of its course – the sons of farmers become farmers in turn, their flesh and blood tied eternally to the land. Some escape, of course, but only rarely. I am one of the lucky few.

Perhaps embarrassingly for the inbred Altmeri intelligentsia of urban Alinor – presupposing that elves are capable of being embarrassed, of course – the Kemendelia seems to exemplify many of the traits foundational to the society as a whole. Primarily, I speak of their stagnation, here; for as obstinate and resistant to the recombination of ideas as the elves are in fields of intellectual merit, so too are their agromancers unwilling to accept new practices. The claim – the boast, from Altmer – is that agriculture in Alinor has existed without change since nearly the beginning of recorded history. The island and its corollaries are divided into the same twenty-four geographical regions today as they were when the Dominion was conquered by the Empire in the Second Era. What that says about the progress of elven thought in that time is self evident. Purportedly, the isle was delineated according to formulae from the Dawn, and thus the original divisions remain 'the pinnacle of managerial sublimity.' Ridiculous claims, naturally, but we will leave the question – if you can call it a question – aside until I have evaluated the situation firsthand.

The agricultural activity of each of these two dozen regions is meticulously managed by a local central agency, headed by the region's edaphomancers. Housed in a facility the Thalmori pamphlet calls a 'Solum,' this agency regulates how, when, and what the growers of the area will produce in any given season. Again, note how perfectly the Kemendelia exemplifies Altmeri society on the grander scale; even their agriculture is bound in pointless formal rigidity, removing free will from the individual owner and alienating him from his product. To be clear, I say 'pointless' only in reference to the formality of the institution, for there can be no doubt that agricultural productivity benefits from the implementation of explicitly formulated management – only leave the specifics to the landholders' private decision. To remove choice from the hands of the individual, as is done so pervasively in Altmeri culture, is blatant injustice; the traditional, collective merish model is but one more form of tyranny, however its proponents may claim otherwise.

Of specific regions, their crops, and of agronomic practices – sorcerous or mundane – I am as of yet unable to explicate. I never did make my way round to the study of temporispatial geography the way I intended, to my regret, so all but the foggiest of spectra on Alinor's physical composition are unavailable to me at the moment – aside, naturally, from what I have seen with my own eyes. Which means, in sum: the country's titular citadel, Alinor. And as for _that_ – well, despite my ignorance of the field, I can say with perfect confidence that the Skeining City could fill an entire course with its dicephalic-dimensional vagarity. I know only that I have been consigned to _Arbasdiil, _supposedly the oldest of all Alinor's Soli, and the birthplace of edaphomancy. The site is located in the main island's central valley, sheltered from the seas by mountains on all but the eastern front. Who and what await me there, in which degree of endurability, I shall learn within the week. You will be informed.

With repeated apologies for my lapse in temper, I conclude my report. As ever, this is:

Jon Urfe

Specialist in Poly-Spectral Comprehension Techniques and Phenomena

Collegiate Ambassador to the School of Thoughts and Calculations and the Aldmeri Dominion in Alinor

College of Whispers

Dispatch to the Assemblage of Provincial Oversight  
College of Whispers, Miscarcand Cynosure  
Dynamistographic Transcription of Urfe's Seventh Harmonic Spectra-Sphere  
Date: 21 Second Seed, 4E XXX

Alinor: territory of angles and alienation. The land is blatantly reflective of the sharp edges so prominently featured in the Altmer national countenance, both physical and psychological. As the faces of the elves are harsh and hard with bony chins and slashing noses, with peaked brows and long, knife-pointed ears, so too is their terrain sculpted into a visage of refined cruelty. What were no doubt once rolling hills immediately outside Alinor city rising to a low spine of mountains parallel the coast has been rendered instead into a series of rigid and unnatural galleries, an expanse of artificial steppes; the elves have laid scalpels of sorcery to their land without remorse, carving the countryside into white walled terraces for as far as the eye can see; broader as the slope decreases at the base of each hill and narrower near the crest, and precisely delineated, curving with the contours of the terrain as though the island were flesh tattooed in emerald rings and stripes. Oh, aye, it is verdant, to be sure – each terrace overflows with vegetation of such chromatic supersaturation that it seems almost to run under one's gaze, the dripping emerald lines of the vibrant 'fields' oozing up to meet the impossibly perfect azure of the skies like wet paint in the sun – but it is a harsh verdancy; there is nothing here of tender Kynareth. Tiny ramps and sweeping stone staircases in innumerable variety scale the hillsides – if hillsides these mer-manufactured edifices can still be called – connecting each level to the next and the strange, crystalline or metallic architecture of the homes of the Altmer each to the other where they jut from the flattened crests. See: the owners of this artificial land do not suffer themselves to live embraced in the arms they have so ravaged, but rather must elevate themselves above their twisted creation. As the elves distance themselves from authenticity and sincerity in their relationships, both personal and professional, so too do they distance the land from the organic, guileless expression of nature and replace it with their cold and comfortless elven synthetics. One hesitates even to call it 'countryside,' now, so completely have the Altmer obscured whatever the land's original form may have been, and so little does it resemble what any human would consider wilderness. It would be more accurate to say that we have entered Alinor's agricultural district than that we have left the city, in truth, for there is no clear distinction to indicate where the Skeining City's strands end and the 'countryside' begins; Alinor's spiraling crystal towers, its effulgent walls and shimmering quartz-paved streets spin away into the stepped fields without regard for the confines of urbanity, spawning arched colonnades and mirror-spined domes and arcing out its glassy suspended streets in rays across the chiseled hills of jade.

And no, I do not exaggerate this last point, as incredible as it may seem. Even now, as I roll my Mangler in my fist, composing this message for your transcription, the carriage that carries me to my destination slides along suspended hundreds of feet in the air by an enormous bridge of translucent glass, and in all directions and at a panoply of levels do other such constructions jut across the landscape, arrowing out from the city proper in shining beams to meet the wavering horizon, supported at exact intervals by jagged black struts jutting from the earth below. I look out and down through the narrow window of this dark carriage and – no. No, what I see cannot be described as 'wilderness,' or even 'nature.' It is but Alinor extended, nature subsumed in elvish artifice and arrogance. I see a city, a city that goes on for miles, unending – perhaps unend_ed._ No wonder that the Altmer discarded the title under which their homeland passed when it stood as a province of the Empire and reverted to its ancient title; for why name it Summerset Isle when it is but a single metropolis, Alinor, sprawled in uninterrupted architecture from sea to sea?

But supposition at this point, of course; I have yet seen only a tiny portion of the isle. More than any other of the College's Ambassadors, perhaps, but still not yet enough to pass generalizations on the whole of the region. Surely – _surely – _the situation will be more natural farther inland, under the auspices of these edaphomancers I go to meet. Surely they cannot be _quite _as given to the subjugation of the natural world as their urban cousins; I cannot imagine that a group of mages specifically given to the study of the fundament of agriculture has not long since come to the realization that Kynareth does it best, and that neither man nor mer nor beast should treat so invasively with her domain. I expect to see smooth hills and more organic, _earthy _architecture soon.

But there are hours and hours left in the journey, yet, even at the prodigious rate this contraption's soap-bubble belly bearings slick it along behind these strange, narrow-hipped horses. A strange mode of transportation as a whole, this, the vehicle as well as its motivators. All elven conveyances baffle the human mind at first sight, of course, with their preposterous grandeur and incredible intricacy, the brilliance of their mirror-bright shells and the beauty of their arch-necked specimens of equinity, but the Thalmor's model strikes one in quite another way entirely. Low to the ground where most perch high on their enchanted goniochromatic sphere-wheels, and dull-dark where most shine like the noon-sun, the carriages of the Thalmor leave one ever unnerved. There is something sly and feline in the long curving line of the low compartment's shell, with its narrow view screens slashing its grey-black sides like tiger stripes or the gills of a shark of midnight. They slink, where others prance, sliding around Alinor's circular corners with the grace and confidence of a leopard; ever a surprise to find suddenly at one's side, and ever a queer unsettled relief to find silently vanished in a second's lapse of attention. To be here, now, within these dark velvet padded walls, in this low sling of a seat, is, surprisingly, less like having entered the belly of the beast than it is to having the wide black eyes of the leopard or shark pressed a few short inches from my own, the blacks of our pupils swirling together in mutual superficial disregard. Not the most comforting conditions for a journey; but let us press on.

The carriage's oddities, as no doubt the Assemblage will already be aware, are but one more of the superficial divergences the Thalmor uses to distinguish itself, as the ruling party, from the rest of their society. One need look no further than my travelling companion to find another example of the phenomenon; he sits there, legs coolly crossed beneath stiff grey-black folds, his delicate, long-fingered hands folded across his narrow knees, a picture of pale reserve; his robes cut with the starkly simple elegance of straight lines and acute angles characteristic of the uniforms of clerks and magisters of law, when the nobility among whom his political station has seated him clothe themselves in flowing, voluminous wraps of sea-silk as shimmeringly vibrant and variegated as the wings of flutter-bys or the iridescent scales of water snakes; his hair one dark, thick braid pulled forward over his robes' jutting, gold-rimmed collar, sparkling darkly with its oily sheen, when the usual trend is the increase of stylistic complexity in direct relationship with an elf's stature in society, simple braids and woven caps for laborers and the simplest of artisans, towering knotted lock-labyrinths for the most high; the soft skin of his pinched face pale like yellowed parchment where the universal love of the sun's kiss keeps all other sects of Altmeri society a healthful tawny, a gold that nearly glows no matter what hue of light happens upon it.

Aatheril, this particular Thalmor is called, and a fair specimen of the agency as a whole. He has honed to an art the uncanny knack of his people for making any human feel like just a bit of an idiotic buffoon, regardless of their skills and education and whatever level of confident egotism they might normally possess. This is he that leans coolly back in his seat as one talks, listening with half of an absurdly long ear and a completeness of confidence that he is quite well three steps ahead of the conversation's direction. No one can put quite the calm assuredness of superiority into a single arched eyebrow and tight-lipped smirk as an Altmer, but Aatheril surpasses even the norm for his race. Just now he turned to me, as I composed the section above, with that very same lopsided smirk that draws his chin down ever so slightly toward his neck and reveals a single alabaster eyetooth between his thin lips, oozing condescension with every word as he said,

"Well, now, Ambassador Urfe, tell me: how do you contemplate the attainment of this journey's object?"

He spoke in the common tongue, but I replied in Altmeri.

"With favor, to be sure." Of course this was a lie, but one must do what one can to prevent the satisfaction of an elf's insults.

Aatheril quirked a razor thin eyebrow into an even higher point than usual. "Indeed?" he said, cheek tightening ever so slightly as he prevented his smirk from deepening. "You seem most pensive, Ambassador. Are you certain you do not find yourself plagued by unsteady nerves with regards to your reception in Arbasdiil?"

"Quite certain," I answered. "Why should I doubt the hospitality of the Kemendelia? The people of Alinor have been _nothing _if not welcoming thus far in my time here." Which put them firmly in the category of the void, naturally.

"Of course, of course," Aatheril muttered, lips edging just a touch into the realm of the sneer with suspicion of my sarcasm. "But Alinor is not all of one piece, Ambassador. It would be only logical for one in your position to suspect that – _rural _– Altmer relate to outsiders in a manner quite different from their urbane brothers and sisters." Indeed I did expect it, but with hope, not anxiety; for any change from the complete ignorance and indifference of the splinter-nosed city mer could only be an improvement. "But you are confident, are you? Completely content?"

"Completely content?" I repeated, shooting him the driest of wry glances through the carriage's sun-slanted gloom. "That much would be exaggeration, I'm afraid."

"You do not find our assignation to your liking?"

I shrugged, turning back to the narrow window slit to allow him to satisfy his ego with a gloating grin at my back. "I did not say that. I am satisfied to learn of any facet of magic and to teach what I may wherever I am sent, as my role is set out in the terms of the College's agreement. I merely said that 'completely content' would be an exaggeration of my feelings. My specialty is communication, after all, as your Thalmor ought to have realized, and I cannot deny that I would have preferred something more suited to my talents. Still, I am certain I shall find plenty with which to interest myself regardless – and this _does _give me the opportunity to enjoy your island." I nodded once to the oversharp and oversaturated land floating by below.

The elf lifted the long fingers of one hand in a brief wave of polite dismissal. His polished nails flashed as they passed through a slanting ray of sunlight.

"All was done according to the legislature of the Scholastic Embassy," he said. "Ambassadors must be appropriately apportioned amongst our institutions to abide by the bylaws of the agreement between the College of Whispers and the School of Thoughts and Calculations. The Thalmor but obey and interpret the established ordinances and regulations; we do not write them."

Considering that it was a member of the _ruling party _of the Aldmeri Dominion who said it, that may seem just the slightest bit hypocritical to the Assemblage; and indeed so it would once have seemed to me as well. But, despite that I have been so far frustrated in my attempts to delve the inner workings and original foundations of the Thalmor as a political entity, I _have _managed to learn something of the group's philosophy. While all Alinorian Altmer I have ever met have been inextricably bound in dedication to regulation and rigidity, the Thalmor carry their reverence to the level of obsession. The Word, as the body of Altmeri law is known, is almost sacred to this organization, and they hold the enactment of its dictates as their highest directive. Why should such a group have risen to power, you ask, if their only passion is the interpretation and perpetration of the law? I cannot yet answer that question with confidence. Perhaps it is the very honor that the law carries with it in the collective mind of Alinor that has elevated them thusly. Perhaps what we see as the rulers of Alinor are but the executive arms of some hidden legislative. Or perhaps the Thalmor see their actions in politics as a mere extension of their philosophy… perhaps in ruling, they see themselves upholding a higher Word in the world than that of their people – the Word of Divinity, perhaps? Perhaps not. We shall see.

"Of course, I understand," I said smoothly, adjusting myself in the swaying sling seat as the carriage rounded a turn of the shining high road. The ringing ping of the moonstone-shod horses echoed momentarily back into the carriage's compartment, and the slits of sunlight streaming in through the leopard's narrow gills slid hard up against the velvety interior walls, flooding the compartment with a sudden blackness. "I did not intend my comments to be taken as complaints or as any other form of disparagement. Did I not say that I am content?"

"Indeed you did," came the soft reply; only the watery glint of his eyes showed in the gloom. "And the Thalmor are glad of it. Our edaphomancers would be so disappointed to learn that you had decided not to come. They are always so eager to share the fruits of their labors, after all."

"Earnest, are they?" I replied, suppressing a laugh. "How droll. What else would you care to share with regards to my soon-to-be hosts? Any particular shards of wisdom I should have before making my debut?"

Aatheril coughed, a sound like yellowed paper crumpling. "Did you not read the informational booklet we provided on the subject?"

"I read it. I merely thought you might have more detailed knowledge or advice based on personal experience."

His dark silhouette rotated back and forth, the hem of his collar flexing as his thick braid tensed and relaxed on his shoulder. "No one has personal experience with the Kemendelia," he said. "We do not see them. We do not speak with them, except when they are outside of their normal capacity. They have their place and their function; we have ours. This is the Way of things."

A few moments of darkness and stretched silence broken only by the pealing tones of the horses' hooves as I waited for him to elaborate. "Ah," I breathed at last, when it became apparent that he had no intention of continuing. "I suppose I shall have to cope with the knowledge I have, then." His dry lips deepened in that same single-toothed smirk once more, but that was the only reply he made, and I fell back into my silent observation of the strange urbanity of the countryside and to the composition of this account.

Dusk rises now before us. Our road has snaked its way across western Alinor for much of the day, passing from the wider terrace-steppes of the port's immediate surroundings to plains tilted at shallow angles in periodic ridges as though the land had been shoved up from below, where terraces were unnecessary except on the lee slope and where a thousand glittering streams and rivers split and tangle with the cross hatches of the land, and then on to the abrupt cliffs of the mountain range roughly paralleling the coast, where the faces of the granite walls are draped in vining vegetation from carven, arched balconies and the gnarled branches of bent fruit trees stretch out their withered arms from the orchards atop the flat crests above the aerial paving stones' sheen. Yes, even the mountains, haven of wilderness to the human mind, bear the indelible stamp of elven artifice. Switch backing stairs etch the sheer granite slopes, so old that much of their preciseness has been worn away, the edges rounded off. Decorative stonework, too, mark the rock in similar softened grandeur; cruelly noble statues and bewildering mandala, robed elves with ears blunted by time and arch-necked horses, unidentifiable beasts with mandibles and fur and three sets of wings tangled among intricate knots worked with the grain of the stone, so masterfully integrated with its compositional irregularities as to make it seem a hundred stones of a hundred colors had been woven together by sculptor sorcerers of old. An awe-inspiring promenade it is, to be sure, to ride that twining suspended street between those looming worked walls, aromas undocumented by man rising up to meet one's olfactory organ as crisp hooves crush in muffled sonority the petals fallen from the budding trees above. It brings to mind the tales one hears of the Imperial City in past years, when Emperors would process through their neat, gleaming capital to the cheers of the people, showered in herbs and flowers cast from the windows and roofs lining the way. An echo twisted in the warped mirror of the elves, that afternoon passage through the Alinorian mountains; resonating with emptiness where humanity resounds with the clamor of life, the only heralds insensible vegetation, our single carriage the only example of intelligent life in that stony district of the city isle, a single speck of motion in a hushed gallery of stasis.

And now the mountains part before us, falling down in slumped-shoulder slopes to yet more stepped fields – they do not end, it seems; city-isle, in truth – and the dusk rises up before us in its seven shades of bruise. We have left the mountains to their amber-antlered blaze, and entered what I take to be the vast central valley of the island; a massive oval bowl rimmed in the same sheer-faced, ravine-riven peaks, gaping so broad and long that its northern cusp is lost already in the indistinctness of twilight. The road turns ahead, to follow the line of the mountains, and an analogous structure is visible in the east, though gone dull and vaguely violet with the dusk where ours yet blazes with the sunset thrumming through its glassy veins. Narrower paths splinter and spiral away from ours and from its dark sister, criss-crossing the bowl at heights less prodigious than that of their parents but never quite touching the earth. They gleam like flax, or the fuzzy strands of a Nord woman's hair, slowly withdrawing the mantle of day from the vale in delayed reflection of the already fallen sun. Their rays sweep and swirl like the tide over the swaying crops below.

And now we have turned aside, onto one of the remnant splinters of day suspended on its black crystal pylons above the fields, and descend further, now toward the center of the valley. And I think me I see my destination. So I will leave the Assemblage now, at that, having traversed with me half of the span of the isle in one day by the preternatural speed of Altmeri equinity, their first taste of Alinor's cold, unapproachable beauty still tingling on their tongues. A further report of the actuality of these 'soil sorcerers' will I etch when I know more of them.

As always, this is

Jon Urfe

Ambassador, etc. etc.

College of Whispers


	3. Chapter 2

**Chapter II**

He awoke in dewy dampness and dawn's desolation, his robes wet and gritty between his shoulders from the night-moist ground at his back, tiny rivulets of water trickling through the sandy hair at the base of his skull. The black leather portmanteau he had used as a pillow lay beaded with cool condensation and the glinting droplets tinkling down from the surrounding thicket of waxy-leaved bushes. Jon Urfe, Ambassador of the College of Whispers, blinked his eye up at the sky's rosy tinge from flat on his back at the edge of an elven field, and wondered why, exactly, he had ever decided to accept the Thalmor's assignation and leave the city. Ignored there he had been, true, but there had at least been others there with whom to commiserate and comfort, with whom to share a little warmth and intimacy in despite – _in _spite of, in truth – the inherent personal alienation of the land. There had been, at least, Odfrin. Now there was only Jon Urfe, almost as alone as he had ever been, completely at the nonexistent mercy of the elves who did not even realize he was there. Yet he pushed himself to his feet in the midst of that deep green growth and pushed the emptiness in his heart down into his toes, shoved it away to face the day.

Dawn is a remarkable thing, in Alinor – though Jon was not, understandably, in any mood to appreciate its beauty. It comes in tendrils, crawling over the land's sleeping etched curves in silent amber threads. The roads are its heralds; their glassy strands net the first true rays of the sun's rising as they break the crests of the eastern waves, and the trapped light seeps through the enchanted aerial paving stones and across the land, ever farther west, washing into intersecting paths and spilling all the time out of its soldered vehicle and into valleys and fields and ravines yet possessed by the velvet of night. The anticipation of dawn in Alinor is a creeping awakening, a slow sweeping of ragged glowing threads to wake the city-isle to the wonder of the sun. When that does, at last, truly break the horizon, the metropolis has been awake and lighted by its glory for hours.

But Jon Urfe gave the shimmering web of interlinked and blazing bridges high above him only the dirtiest of cursory glances before bending back down to rummage in his luggage for a brush for his hair and clothes. He was not interested in the sunrise, he was not interested in Alinor, and he was _certainly _not interested in its dirt wizards – and small surprise, considering their reception – or lack thereof – for him.

The Thalmori carriage had deposited him at the edge of the elevated roadway just above his destination with but a few words from Aatheril to see him on his way and accompany the nondescript piece of opaque quartz that was apparently to be his introduction to the damned edaphomancers. A pop of the driver's flashing whip from his low, fluted seat and the team of grey geldings had wheeled themselves nimbly around, braided tails slashing, pulling the leopard along its sleekly slinking way back up the glassy bridge, stalking the receding sun. And Jon was left alone in the dusk; alone to make his way down the wide, spiraling ramp encircling a supporting pylon, his boar-hide boots clomping quietly on the glossy black stone; alone to watch the sunset fade finally from the sky and the tangled glimmers from the mountains in the west; alone to wander the hollow vacancy of the corrugated white stone compound at the pylon's base; alone to place his feet on solid Alinorian ground for the first time since his arrival; alone to feel none the more comfortable or successful for his accomplishment.

The compound – Arbasdiil, he supposed it must be – was located at the lowest point of the valley, enclosed deepest in both its own walls and in the walls of the land, and as such likewise in deepest thrall to twilight. It mirrored the valley in form, being a long, narrow oval walled in thick, arched stone, but of its specifics Jon could tell nothing; shadows draped everything. He walked slowly northward from the southern tip where the pylon and its glassy road stood silhouetted against the purpling sky, peering warily here and there, trying to discern the nature of his surroundings. Buildings loomed from the stone pavement, sudden domes and abrupt ruffled mounds, seemingly without reason or purpose in the misty gloom. Gaps opened to either side, without warning; the stone began slanting down beneath his feet, into dark egresses that led only to blank sealed doors when he reached the bottom; incomprehensible paraphernalia lay stacked here and there, veiled in dusk. The silence was absolute; indeed, there was no sign save the structures themselves that any intelligent being had ever set foot there.

His drudging, faltering footsteps brought him to the northernmost tip of the compound. His portmanteau dangled limply from his numb fingers. Before him yawned an enormous shallow pit like the inside of a hollowed pearl, capstone to the ruffled walls – a pit whose bottom was an inverted glass dome in a thousand triangular segments. There was no visible entrance, no ramp or stairs to take him down under the glass, down where the elves _must _be, not even a hole with a ladder he might climb down into the earth. There was only the faceted glass bowl and its wide stone rim, empty and hollow save for the solitary robed human perched and peering in forlorn frustration round its silent edge.

No one there. No one there to greet him, to show him to his room and take the introductory stone Aatheril had left him. Perhaps there had _never _been anyone. Perhaps the Thalmor had merely driven him to their equivalent of a wasteland; the oldest and most decrepit district of the city-isle, abandoned by all for millennia. Maybe even the sewers; that inverted dome could be the entrance to a vast underground waste receptacle facility; even the vaunted Altmer were not above that necessity. Would even the Thalmor do that to an Ambassador from the College of Whispers? True, they did not know that he could yet communicate with his superiors in Cyrodiil; for his was the only mechanism of communication which had survived the 'aetherial purification' of their luggage upon arrival. So perhaps the Thalmor would see fit to abandon him to their metropolitan wildernesses with as much impunity as they had seen fit to insult him and the rest of the Ambassadors in the city, thinking themselves secure in the isolation of the event from the knowledge of those on the mainland. Perhaps. Perhaps the Thalmor would not balk at sinking to such depths. Perhaps not. In that moment, though, with the cold rustle of the winds the only sound and the rising moons the only light to glint on the glass below him, in that moment wrapped in loneliness and indecision, Jon Urfe could not decide what the actuality of the situation was, could find neither truth nor certainty nor solidity in any part of his life, much less in his situation and its precedent circumstances, no matter how widely he cast his eye.

And that was why he retreated, that dark, empty night, why he went stumbling from the edge of that glass-bottomed pit and back through the senseless edificery of the abandoned agricultural wasteland almost choking on his own bereft uncertainties; why he did not pause when he reached the southern edge of the compound and found the towering pylons supporting the aerial roadways suddenly burning a pale, unwavering blue-white; why he rushed without heed through that eldritch glow and out, out and up the first flight of stairs he could find into the broad basal terrace field surrounding the dark, strange compound behind him. That was why he, Jon Urfe, Specialist in Poly-Spectral Comprehension Techniques and Phenomena and Ambassador to the Aldmeri Dominion, chose to sleep like an animal, like a coward, like an outcast in a bed of crushed foliage rather than press further that night his investigation of the alien facility.

And that very same lonely uncertainty of his own place in the twisted elven world was why he did, ultimately, when his heart and courage had warmed slightly with the sun, return to the empty stone compound to pursue his goal. Shunned and scorned and alone he was; tricked and duped and abandoned by Aatheril and his Thalmor he may have been; but he would be a coward and a fool if he let the resistance of a foreign land prevent him from acquiring an understanding of it and his own place within its bounds. That dome had seemed to lead to a deeper structure; it might be that he could find something there of interest, if he could penetrate within.

So he returned, in the dewy dawn's anticipation, trudging along down the white stone stairs at the edge of the terrace and back beneath the compound's wall and the looming bridge above it, his damp leather bag dangling on glossy straps at his side, his emerald robes not _too _wrinkled and mussed with bits of duff and dirt from his untidy bed, face not _too _set into his own particular aspect of 'monstrous morning,' ready for – or at least resigned to – the prospect of a long day of exploration.

The compound was much less mysterious by daylight. Built of a peculiar smooth, warp-surfaced stone, it beamed like white chalk in the morning sun, the tall walls like ruffled sea shells enclosing a veritable epicenter of agricultural industry; here was a tall domed warehouse, wall-less save for supporting struts, and half-full with twine-bound bales of incredibly golden hay; there was a pyramidal stack of grain, recognizable as such only because one of the enormous metal drums composing the pyramid and containing the grain had been left open through the night, its round lid ajar to show the star-burred kernels within; here was a building that might almost have been a stable, had it been built of wood and not stone; there was the semblance of a barn, but tight and secure by the simple virtue of the absence of any door or window. But for every feature of the place whose purpose he could vaguely surmise from his rural boyhood there were three whose function baffled him completely; a perfectly round pool set in the stone paving and with obvious steps descending into its clear waters; a giant barrel, twice his height and encrusted in gears; a delicate gyroscope of silver, erected on a pedestal and glinting with the sun; arched buildings like humps in the ground; sudden ramps terminating without reaching any destination; coils of slick rope and stacks of metal rings; bundles of rough cloth and piles of unidentifiable soft white spheres; a hundred curiousities, each seemingly of practical purpose but inexplicable to his uninformed mind.

And for all that the varied paraphernalia scattered around between the white warped-walled buildings made it obvious that _someone _frequented the place, Jon's were still the only steps to be heard echoing between the corrugated walls. The sun stood stoutly above the jut of the eastern mountains, but the strange compound was empty still in its etched emerald bed at the center of the valley. Jon Urfe was still alone.

_But then. _A figure swung out before him from around one of the featureless buildings; a womer, her whip-cord body wrapped close in clean, practical brown robes, her auburn hair braided tight and smooth against her skull and over her pointed ears, her bare feet sheathed in ochre callus, long toes gripping the smooth stones in surprise – as Jon's boots suddenly, inexplicably, _inextricably, _did the same, cleaving to the ground and sending him into a wobbling bow beneath the elf's tight-lipped stare.

"Greetings, madame," Jon said when he had regained his balance. "I am Jon Urfe, Ambass-"

But the womer was not listening. Indeed, she had given him but one swift, analytical glance from head to toe with those narrow, glossy black eyes before turning abruptly aside and marching to the blank face of a low, featureless dome to his left. Before he could even finish introducing himself to her narrow back, her fingers had gone momentarily to the base of her throat, a section of the wall had ground downward without impetus, and she had leaned her braid-bound head into the dark interior to shout,

"I need a conservation team to the yard! Now! We have an unaccounted up here!"

She withdrew swiftly, spinning back to Jon, her golden brow creased in worry as her narrow black eyes swept anxiously back and forth across his body, eying the bag in his hands, the folds of his robe, the untidiness of his hair with an unwarranted degree of concern.

Jon's lips creased in a smile. "Calm yourself, madame. There is no need to become distraught. I am Jon Urfe, sent by –"

"I know who you are," she said, her eyes never leaving their obsessive flickering examination of his apparel. "Human, aged thirty-three, male, born originally from the quindecal lacustrine subclass of the Nibenean morphisol family, probably southern Cyrodiil, and more recently from an alluvial alfisol most common along the River Strid; judging from the chimeric supracoating, I'd say you're from Miscarcand."

Jon gaped. "Well – yes," he said, "but how -?"

"Fundamentals, sir. But no matter. Brace yourself."

And without further warning, the silent, empty compound boiled into furious activity.

Jon had seen many things in his travels across Tamriel, had been greeted in ways strange and sundry by its innumerably variable cultures. The fist to the jawbone customary among Orcs at first meetings had been a bit jarring – bruising, rather; his face had not receded to normal size for a week after he left Orsinium, and it still twinged now and then – at first, but he had always had a naturally strong right hook, and he grew skilled in the use of its full force as a compliment to the strength of the Pariah Folk after not _too _long an adjustment period. The Khajiit's friendly tongue-kiss he could not have endorsed more enthusiastically - although he had kept all his relations with males strictly formal when he learned the custom was not gender specific. The Nords, of course, couldn't call a man 'friend' unless they had stumbled away from a tavern together at least once – which is perhaps less strange than it seemed to Jon when first he experienced it – and of course no one in High Rock could have an even moderately intimate conversation with a favored guest without feeding the lucky blighter some delectable morsel with their own fingers (which explains, incidentally, the strange phenomenon of unequal weight distribution among the Bretons; the most popular and charismatic of that race tend towards a – usually – pleasing plumpness due simply to the frequency of their feeding and being fed by friends, whereas the shunned or outcast or simply asocial members of that people are pale and skinny simply by isolation from the culture of food).

But for all his experience, all his exposure to the strange wonders and discomforts of foreign societies, Jon Urfe was profoundly unprepared for the greeting of the Kemendelia. He was unprepared for the sudden storm of hunched, thickset figures mummified in strips of white cloth that erupted from the sudden hundred dark gaps in the ground and in the walls around him; could only with the greatest of bewilderment have predicted that they would cluster around him in a worried bunch, jabbering in a tongue _he had never heard _and peering up at him from above their white shrouds with brilliantly blue eyes set in deep green sockets; did not expect their gloved, spider-articulate hands to caress his body from toe to crown, or to pull his head to the side so as to run a delicate comb through his poorly-brushed hair, or that they would rub the softest silk cloths and the smoothest of pumice stones over every exposed portion of skin with the care due the Emperor himself. And certainly, after such an excess of conscientiousness, he could not have foreseen that they would strip him without ceremony, without a single whit of attention to his protesting cries aside from the comforting pats one might give a dog or horse during a stressful surgery, that they would tug his bag from his resisting fist and spread its contents out across the ground, would gently unwind his robes from around his body despite the flailing arms it took three each to subdue, that they would not even leave him his underthings as a last shred of dignity, but would unwrap those, too, from his loins, with the utmost of preoccupied carefulness. No, despite all his experience, all his exposure to strange cultures and his familiarity with the cold cruelty of Alinorian Altmer, Jon Urfe would never have guessed that his first meeting with the Kemendelia would see him naked from the feet up in full view of a gathering crowd of elves and their odd, linen-wrapped servants.

His jaw flexed compulsively as he stood there, the pebbled skin and hefty, muscular limbs of his lightly furred human body completely bared for display, save only for the shriveled genitals he covered grudgingly with one large hand. He watched in silence, nose tightly flared, as his clothes were stretched out before him between white-gloved fists, to be brushed ever inch, front and back, with tiny, delicate tools and then examined minutely, the cloth held not even a finger's length from the noses of the crew and inched across slowly from hem to hem. A little ways off, another group was performing a similar procedure with the rest of his luggage; they sat crowded in a huddle on the stone, passing his possessions around their circle for close inspection and then a thorough cleaning – his brush and handcloth, his bottle of rarest bug musk and personal cutlery, the cases for his private collection of spectra-spheres and comprehension crystals and the gems themselves; all his possessions plundered from their secret holdings and fondled by blatant, unfamiliar hands in the public eye. The Altmer womer he had surprised – or rather, who had surprised _him _– paid him absolutely no mind, instead focused completely on the activities of her bustling servants, frowning in worried concentration.

One – a particularly ungainly fellow, with long, thick, dangling arms, shoulders set slightly off kilter and a jerking, lopsided walk – approached the womer as his fellows concluded the last bits of their inexplicable business. He bowed himself into a hunchback's stoop, proffering a sealed glass cylinder in his enormous hands.

"This uns all, missus."

The womer's fine, rawboned hand plucked the glass gently from her servant.

"Very good, Falif," she said, holding the cylinder before her eyes and examining its contents closely – though from what Jon could see all it contained was a few bits of dead plant litter and a light dusting of dirt. "Return Master Urfe's clothes to his body, please. I'll do his boots when you're ready. Bound to be some there."

"O course, o course missus," muttered the bent servant, backing away as his fellows stepped up beside the human captive, his garments ready in their hands.

"I – can – dress – my – self," Jon grated abruptly. "I could have _un_dressed myself, if I had been _asked. _There was – IS – no need for this – this – _this!"_ He gestured frustratedly to the cluster of white-wrapped figures bunched under his arms and busily engaged in retwining his robes about his torso.

For the first time, the womer met his eyes directly.

"Calm yourself, Jon Urfe of the College of Whispers," she said. "They are most well-trained. Our goblins will not hurt you. Do not fear."


	4. Chapter 3

**Chapter III**

"Lift his feet, please. A bit higher. Thank you."

The womer knelt before Jon, elf before human, but it was hardly a position one could call supplicatory; not when Jon was suspended, immobile and against his will in the satin-uniformed hands of fifteen goblins – _goblins! _The Altmer really did keep goblins as slaves! – and the womer knelt only because she had some strange fascination with his clothing. Her long fingers turned his tall, buckled leather boots this way and that under her eyes, enacting an examination that was, if anything, more thorough than that to which the rest of his garments had been subjected. Every few seconds it seemed she found some speck of interest and her fingers flew to the spot to scrape it carefully into the glass jar with the rest of the bizarrely mundane collection her slaves had made. It was small clods of dirt she collected mostly, from what Jon could see in his awkward position, though his boots had not been particularly grimed, despite his brief walk through the field's edge. And why should she care about _dirt, _anyway?

She straightened up after a few more long, embarrassing minutes, tightening the lid once more on her glass jar and gesturing to her goblins to get him back on his feet.

"How bad is it, Rumarene?"

The voice – a womer's, and clear as a bell's song – rang out from behind Jon in a breathless fret.

"Fairly well what you'd expect, Ilandra," answered the tight-robed womer – Rumarene? – before him as her dark, narrow eyes jumped over his shoulder. "Much of the symplast has been cleaved, and there's been a perceptible loss in identity buffering capacity, but the apoplast is largely intact, oddly enough. Still, we'll need to have the southern edge of the sector excised and put into the standard rehabilitation regime. Nothing _too _drastic, considering."

"I'll get it done right away," said the second voice, as the crowd of white-clad goblins parted in a bowing wave around its owner's willowy, swaying figure. Taller than the first, this elf, and more winning in face and form. Her hair was a braided plait of gold spitting frays of amber to her knees, her feet likewise bare, her robes tucked tight around her shapely body but bagged and gapping oddly in places as though she had dressed absentmindedly in the dark. Her face, as she reached Rumarene and drew the other womer close in a full-armed hug, was a beaming, dimple-cheeked picture of open friendliness. Her lips came down to Rumarene's waiting, uplifted mouth, and after a long tongue-stroking exchange, separated and turned back to the open-mouthed Jon Urfe's fury, momentarily paralyzed by bafflement.

"Well, Jon Urfe, you have certainly caused plenty of trouble, haven't you?" said the taller womer, pretty face frowning down at him disapprovingly, dimples dried up like puddles in the sun. "What were you thinking of, trying to steal from us like that? Don't you know what you could have done?"

"No, I do _not _know, _madame!_" replied Jon vehemently, unsticking his jaw. "Just as I do not know why it was necessary for me to be so publicly humiliated, or –"

"Don't chastise the poor child, Ilandra," said Rumarene, looking up at her companion and giving her a squeeze above the elbow. "He knows nothing. Men never do."

"Ah, of course," replied Ilandra, cheeks flushing slightly. "My apologies, Jon."

While Jon was still recovering from the threefold shock of the insult couched in the novelty of being called by his first name and the shock of an _apology _from an elf all in the same sentence, Rumarene went on.

"But do tell us, Jon," she said, narrow eyebrows arched curiously, "what is it that brings you to us? It has been some few years since we hosted guests from the continent."

Jon's full mouth tightened as he clasped his wrists tightly in the small of his rigidly erect back. "With all due respect, your _eminence," _he began, "I must admit myself stymied as to why such a one as _you _should ask such a one as _I _about anything whatsoever. You have, after all, quite recently professed your own disdain for whatever possible store of knowledge I may or may not possess, as you have likewise already _demonstrated _your own knowledge of my history and origins, and _as _you have already consummately _bared _me to whatever _investigations _of my person you could _possibly _have wished to impose."

The hand-clasped pair of womer exchanged a long look, a look filled with enough sad pity to redouble Jon's fury three times over.

"We don't know everything about you, Jon," Ilandra answered after a long pause. The dimpling smile had again fled her amber cheeks; her mouth seemed very small without it. "Just what we can read in your birthmarks."

"I do not have a birthmark," he clipped off coldly, ignoring the sad downturn of the elven eyes and the strange irrelevance of the comment.

"Everyone has birthmarks," murmured Rumarene softly. "Even men. _Especially _men. But regardless," she raised her voice smoothly as he opened his mouth in attempted refutation, "we know nothing of your purpose in Arbasdiil. Why have you come here?"

"I did not come," he answered with mulish particularity, "I was brought. Assigned." He fumbled as composedly as possible about his goblin rearranged robes, patting and searching until he located the small, opaque piece of quartz Aatheril had given him as 'introduction' upon his deposition outside the compound. "Here," he went on, proffering the plain piece of crystal upon one broad palm, "I believe this was intended as explanation. Though I little understand how."

Ilandra's thin fingers brushed across his skin as she withdrew the stone. "Ah, yes. This is a message, Jon. Watch." And with a single, delicate flick, the womer_ unfolded _the crystal; a fracturing blossom of light reflected momentarily from an infinity of impossibly layered and angled mirror planes, and then it had resolved into a single sheet, Ilandra's long wrist was shaking out a short roll of smooth cloth stained on one side in pictographic Altmeri script.

"Just a script," said Rumarene, smiling cautiously at the amazement hidden in Jon's stiffly blank face and blatant in the popping of his eyelids. "Tie anything to itself enough times in the right way and you can make a crystal of it. It's a common technique."

"Ruma," breathed Ilandra on the heels of her companions' words, eyes fixed worriedly down upon the cloth scroll draped over her hand. "Oh, Ruma, you'd better read this." Her other hand came up behind Rumarene's neck, pulling the shorter womer's head down to rest with cheek pressed above Ilandra's breast. Her long golden fingers stroked the other's slick knotted hair as Rumarene read – and as her narrow black eyes took on the same sad and worried tilt at their edges as Ilandra's. Jon could only watch, in wonder buried somewhere underneath all his stiff-backed, wounded pride, at the incredibly open intimacy of the pair. It seemed to him as though their distance from humanity had grown so great that they could not even truly register his presence enough to restrain their behavior to the limits of propriety in the presence of humans, the level of reticence and distance from each other that all other Altmer he had ever encountered had maintained while he was near. It was as though he did not really exist, to them, or at the very most did not exist in the same way they did to each other. The insult of that burned with humiliation almost as deep as that of his public nudity; that he should be so profoundly unimportant that two Altmer, that race most reserved with its affections, would openly display their tenderness before him without care or shame. He did not matter.

Rumarene gave a long sigh as her eyes lifted from the end of the scribed cloth scroll and set softly on Jon's darkly blank face. One rawboned hand patted Ilandra's tiger waist through her untidy gray-green robes as she spoke.

"You come from the Thalmor, Jon."

He jerked his head in mixed acknowledgement and denial. "In some sense, yes, although our outreach is scholastic, not political. The School of Thoughts and Calculations has proven… reticent in their dealings with my College's Ambassadors, however, and it has been instead agents of your Thalmor that have seen to the enactment of most of the practical aspects of our institutions' partnership."

Another long, piteous look between the two golden elves, this time more guarded. The taller spoke, her little amber lips twitching carefully.

"And what is it the Thalmor sent you to accomplish amongst the Kemendelia?"

Jon laughed; a harsh little cough that twisted his mouth momentarily into an ugly sneer. "Accomplish?" he drawled. "I doubt most strongly my ability to do anything of the sort; yours is the most indelible of societies. And again I say: the Thalmor did not send me. I am here at the behest of the Empire's College of Whispers, an Ambassador to the School of Thoughts and Calculations in Alinor, and I have absolutely no intention to wreak changes of any sort upon your monolithic people. I came to Alinor with but one goal in mind – a goal that has thus far been impeded at every pass by the fundamental cultural differences between elves and men. Which is to say: by your cruelty, obstinance, and arrogance. Yet I seek it still, and shall for the entirety of my short _mortal _life, for my goal is the redeemer of man, the highest form of comprehension: understanding."

He drew himself up proudly, ever so slightly short of breath from the emotion with which his own words had caught him; let them frown and chide, and trade their piteous looks over his fallacious mortal thought; he cared naught for what they thought. Let them mock and degrade him behind their snide polities and underhanded honors; they were blinded by their own arrogant stagnation, like all the rest.

But to the huffy human's stiffly hidden surprise, the faces of his two interrogators bloomed in identical soft, hopeful, approving smiles.

"That is very good, Jon Urfe," murmured Ilandra past her narrow dimples, green-gold eyes twinkling. "Very good. You have one of the first steps, already."

"Indeed he does," agreed Rumarene, nodding as she, too, smiled approval down at the human. Jon could only frown, in silence miffed not-so-slightly by the consciousness of expectations once more thwarted, of a preliminary understanding duped, and a calm superiority whose guard he had still not surpassed. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, portmanteau at his side, in the midst of a crowd of what-satined goblin onlookers in the halo-heavy burst of ripening morn, face stubbornly blank as the two intimate Altmer smiled gently down at him.

"We should go, Ilandra," said Rumarene at last, twining her fingers through the other womer's and tugging her gently around.

"Definitely," she replied, willowy, awkward-robed figure stepping gracefully after her partner. Around Jon, the goblins began to disperse, talking once more in their own strange tongue, in pairs or threes or fours as they vanished back into the dark gaps from whence they had come. The hidden doors rose behind them in the walls, sliding back to indistinguishability.

The taller of the elves looked back over her shoulder to the still motionless human as her longe, bare feet padded on the smooth stones.

"Do come along, Jon Urfe," she said. "He'll want to meet you, of course."

"Pardon me?" Jon replied, answering in reflex and starting abruptly into motion, catching up his bag in one large hand as he hurried to make up the distance between them. "Who is it will wish to make my acquaintance?" he went on when he had reached the womers' side.

"Oh, the Son, of course," answered Rumarene, looking down at him across her partner.

"Your son? Why?"

"Not _our _son," laughed Ilandra. "Not at all. _The _Son. The head of our order, I suppose you would put it. He's far older than either of us."

"How old, exactly?"

The pair exchanged a loaded look once again. Rumarene answered.

"Eight millennia."

Jon barely blinked at the claim, despite that it was longer than Nirn's own age, by the orthodox calculations; it was a typical boast, from an elf. They always did think highly of their own longevity.

"And the name of this octomillenigenarian?"

"Tsirelsyn," answered Ilandra, dimples hiding from the sudden seriousness in her eyes. "Firstborn of earth… whose dewy eyes glimpsed the Dawn."


	5. Chapter 4

**Chapter IV**

What is the directionality of the horizon? Is it in the east, where the conjoined twin of change, the restless borderline of dawn and dusk, rises to greet the subjective? Or is it in the west, whence that hazy demarcation flees? North, where the skies are rife with the light of the aether no matter the hour? Or south, whose breast is most bereft of all? Stand now and see; the plains spreading around you, grasses rippling their stem-sea waves, the day blushing in the east over the purpling bruise it has given the night in the west. Before you is the horizon, whence breaks the sun; behind you is horizon, whence the moons die; to each side is horizon, creeping with amber and violet. Now quick, time to move: run, and let your feet pound the earth, swift as you will to catch that vertical border – for border indeed is the horizon's heart. And there you are, flushed; have you caught it? Mount up your prize! No? No, indeed. You have moved, and the horizon has met you pace for pace; receding ahead, proceeding behind, keeping friendly time to either side. You turn, dizzied, bewildered, and, yes; the horizon has you ringed, still. Though it peeks its narrow face at you from all sides, it stands inviolate to capture in all cardinal directions.

One plane, then, is done and gone from the quest; what of the others? Your chin lifts, and your skull touches your neck, your eyes the dawn cloven sky. No horizon visible there, at least not from Nirn, but catch it you could not when to its obvious aspect you gave chase. So lift up your arms and flex your buttocks, and – ah, there you are amongst the glittering pinprickled stars and the eight whirl-twirling planets, floating in Oblivion where the Daedra wield their Misrule. Now pay attention, please, and don't let the tenebrous nebulae distract you; you're here for a purpose. About spin and quick-search the seas of Void; for there she is, our multihued Nirn, crux of the cosmos. And, see: another horizon revealed, though you have met it before; the border-brush of dawn-dusk, driving night's eternal flight across the face of Nirn's contention.

But for all its beauty, it is not that which you seek. It is a border, yes, but of a more fundamental firmament. Light meets its absence, in the dawn-dusk, but these are not the elements of Nirn's conflict. Yes, conflict; conflict and change. These, too, are at the heart of the horizon; for an abutment of any one thing and its antithesis is bound to bring change; the horizon is the progenitor of novelty. Look ye now, and witness but one fruit it has born; glorious Nirn, crux of all things, born in the direction of a husk's horizon, whose drama is the interplay of forces both old and new. Aye, forces: thus do we call the children of horizon. Light and dark play across Nirn's face, but it is the offspring of their twilight conjugation that has made her new, and it is the new horizon you seek, not the old; earth upon sky, not light upon dark.

Just one choice now, and perhaps always the most obvious; Nirn herself has been quietly nudging you toward it all along. So release, and take her quiet guiding hand – and down, down, down you fall in her gravity-grip, webbed in blur. And, ho! You've found your answer in the culmination-crash, for there all around you are the lines of all eternity's horizons etched in the earth; deep black on pale white atop virulent yellow and gritty grey, ochre below silver below stone. A thousand delicate layers of soil atop Nirn's dear bones, and each one a horizon in infinity, together composing the earthy profile-matrix of time. And there, _there, _therein lies the truth of it; down is the directionality of the horizon. Gravitation is the vector of the new.

The majority of this reflection was, unfortunately, lost on Jon Urfe, despite that he was indeed surrounded by the earthy horizontal profile. No; for once Jon's inherent insatiable curiousity had failed, had faltered under the withering elven disregard of the city, and had been summarily snuffed by the blatant, unshakeable superiority and callous pity of his first brush with the Kemendelia. Ilandra and Rumarene had led him north through the ruffled stone compound – Arbasdiil, he supposed it was – north past crowds of shining uniformed goblins hurrying here and there, rolling barrels and hitching bistre horses to long, flat metal conveyances, loading and unloading, arranging and rearranging and a thousand other things at which Jon could only guess, north through the agricultural epicenter come anthill-alive with the day's breaking, north to its inverted pearlescent capstone; the enormous, glass-bottomed pit from which he had fled the night before. It had an entrance, as it happened, but one just as esoteric as the indistinguishable doors from which the goblin slaves had so suddenly emerged to humiliate our Jon. They came to the wall of the pit, and Ilandra's hand went beneath the folds of cloth at her long throat as Rumarene's had likewise earlier done, and without visible motive a broad section of the shell-fluttered wall had slid silently down into the ground.

And then the pit itself; the sudden humidity of the earth's exhalation across Jon's stilted features, his first true dram from Nirn's umbilical lungs, warm like the musk of flesh, gravid with the incense of innumerable minutiae lain long nascent in the soil; the walls but raw earth left unworked and unwreaked, rough and irregular in its thick-layered horizons, moist and faintly glistening; the vast hollow depth of it, beamed in faint sunlight and shafts of glowing amber glass. Ramps of the warp-surfaced stone from above lined its curving walls, ramps and sweeping white staircases branching curlicues and twining spirals through the open space; arched windows and gateways piercing the raw walls, jutting balconies and peninsula-hung gazebos alongside wide, bridged colonnades. And all of it quite plain, in truth, unadorned save for the natural smooth rills and warps of the stone. Distinctly workaday, even; it was no place of leisure and idleness, but rather of duty, gravity, and practicality. Here a long set of ropes suspended a slowly gyrating crate twice as tall as any Altmer from floating, glowing purple tethers, unattended but loosely anchored to a nearby balcony; there a gleaming group of goblins clambered across the outside of a swinging net bulging with black bundles; and everywhere lay the evidence of agricultural industry.

But Jon Urfe was not interested. He did not care that he had descended nearly three hundred feet already below Nirn's surface with no end in sight to the pit's depths; did not care that the cylinder's walls were still horizoned in healthy soil, despite that the deepest level of pedogenesis in Cyrodiil – or, indeed, almost anywhere in the Empire – was at most just sixty feet in its entirety; he did not care about the things Rumarene and Ilandra told him as their bare feet and clasped hands led him ever deeper below the earth; did not care that this was, indeed, Arbasdiil, first and oldest Solum in all Alinor; did not care that this, this pit, was the center of all agriculture for a hundred miles around; was not interested in _why _the elves – the rigid, stilted, pretentious Altmer – should choose to leave their epicenter so primitively unfinished despite the fact that they clearly possessed over and above the technology to instate a more refined presentation.

No, Jon Urfe did not care about much at all, that first day amidst the Kemendelia. And can we blame him? Can _you _blame him? He was a man of irrepressible approachability under normal circumstances, set for months in the dizzying midst of a people whose nature – or so it seemed to him – was composed primarily of distance and indifference. He was a man who craved understanding, plunged into a culture of incomprehensibility. He was a foreigner in a land whose people hated and belittled his race, a man of inherent interconnectivity abruptly removed from the fragile support network he had built up in that land and sent to a sect of society of utter inconsequence. He was cold, tired, hungry, and embarrassed beyond all hope of expression, and he was very, very cranky. He was a man primed for a fight, certainly, but in no way imaginable was he outfitted to appreciate and investigate the wonders of his surroundings.

And so when their spiraling ramp did at last deposit them at the warmly breathing bottom of the raw shaft, where the horizons brooded blackly and the egress above was but a tiny bright aperture in the earth, Jon Urfe felt no surprise at the sights that greeted him; no amazement at the subterranean arboretum growing quiet and vibrant like moss in the crevice's depths; no wonder at the spills of jade ivy gushing quite literally out of the soil-walls, or at the bent trunks of the towering stone-fruits in heady violet bloom, or the fluttering silver leaf bowing its brilliant heads to the white stone paths; no impression from the neat raised mounds here and there, filled with the efforts of some underground horticulturalist; no awe at the thin glass lattice splintering and spiraling above it all and dripping amber light like fire flies in the hot, post-coital breath of a summer's consummation. And so when his two tall guides had led him across this dim garden, long bare feet silent on the stone path, lungs drinking noticeably deeper of the heavy-scented air of the earth than they had of the sky's above, when they drew up before a narrow door nearly twice as tall as he in the ivy-seeping wall and rapped quiet knuckles on its nondescript age-split boards, Jon thought of none of the questions that might normally have filled his mind – who was this Tsirelsyn? Why was he 'the Son'? Why did he live so humbly? How were the plants maintained, so far from the health of the sky? Why live underground at all? Had he _really _been alive in the Dawn era, when Nirn was just being born? What had it been like? How had he survived for so long? – none of the normal flood of inquisitiveness that so typified the College's Ambassador. At that moment, Jon Urfe could see nothing appetizing in the satisfaction of curiousity, could find nothing redemptive in his situation, could locate no morsel of optimism to lighten his mood. No; he saw but one thing of worth, in his miserable fury: the prospect of expressing the fullness of the extent to which he had been maligned and imposing some small part of his suffering upon another.

Three more raps of the ancient door, delicate golden knuckles on gnarled, petrified wood. And then a voice, grave and deep, spoke in muffled Aldmeris.

"Come in, Ilandra, Rumarene. I would meet your guest."

The pair shot twin smiles of encouraging expectance back to their human guest. Jon only scowled up at them, up at their condescending piteous superiority, and then stepped swiftly past. His free hand jerked up the metal latch, pulled open the narrow door, sent it slamming back against the soft cushion of its ivy frame, and Jon Urfe stepped through the splinter-thin slit and into the velvety laboratory of the first soil-sorcerer.

"I am he you wish to meet," he burst out belligerently as he crossed the threshold, "but thus far, 'guest' would be a gross misapplication of terms."

It was only then that the full strangeness of the chamber he had entered made its impact upon him and cut off the rest of his diatribe. Aye, strangeness: and strangeness it would have been even from a civilized human settlement. In the land of the Altmer, in the city-isle of Alinor with its architecture like shimmering prisms, its utter subjugation of nature unto the very scape of the land, such a chamber as this, for on as presumably high in prestige as the master edaphomancer, the head of all agriculture in Alinor, was absolutely baffling to Jon Urfe in its unsuitability. He had expected an office, a study, a pristinely shining parlor; what he found was a cave.

Vaulted stone, streaked with grey and black, unworked but smooth as a babe from the soft use of the millennia, a rough egg hollow pocked with recesses and nubbined with projections, uneven ledges and natural balconies. Cloth like water; exquisite lengths of sea-silk and velvet in soft, accepting black like a woman's eyes or the soil after a rain, gathered and twined together at the apex of the ceiling and caressing its way down the walls, splitting and spilling and pooling at the hollow egg's broad base in sea-silken pools. Implements and instruments from every profession imaginable scattered about on tables, desks, stools, chairs, mantels, shelves, boulders, and boxes in suspended tinkering enactment of projects innumerable; one bowed out recess of striated wall stood spread and spanned in bits of parchment and strips of vellum held up by rough bits of rock – lodestones, the subtle pull of Jon's Mangler told him – and covered in cramped, untidy scrawlings, in calculations of three dimensional convergence alongside bits of verse, diagrams of sub-particulate architecture beside flowing figure sketches; a long stone table was covered in bits of colored chalk and the esoteric scriptures and cosmological schema they had wrought; a loom lay half hidden behind a fold of the long curtains, frozen in its thread-heady action; supple, gleaming wood stretched its tiger-eyed back in a plush case, threaded with cords of suspended golden sound; books sprawled in all directions, the first true books Jon had yet seen in Alinor, their spines cracked and leather split, but pages clearly kept supple with use and magic, stuffed full and bulging with markers, notes, bits of leaves and flowers, twigs, pieces of charcoal, and even, in one instance, a lock of braided hair. And throughout it all – all the chamber's eclectic disorganized collection – was the soil; clods kept carefully on pedestals and under glass, surrounded by vials and beakers and eyepieces and a hundred other aetherial analyst's tools; bits of dirt adorning the edge of a desk, or spilling over the edge of a dusty gold goblet; pots of earth lined carefully up encircling a ridiculously high stool; sealed jars on shelves and mantles gone green and black with the algae growing within, or spilling over with spore bottomed ferns or the caps of fungi. It was a place of conjugation and introspective contemplation, of the plurality of existence and the interconnectivity of life, a place to reach out and snare Jon Urfe's mind even then, when that vessel came in its most unreceptive state. It was a place of conception, and of comprehension.

"One moment," came the same deep voice echoing up to Jon's staring stance on the narrow ledge just within the door, as his two womer guides stepped in behind him, shaking their heads and frowning sadly down at him. "I will be with you in one moment, Ambassador. Il, Ruma, please bring him down, if you would."

"Of course, Tsiri," Ilandra's voice pealed out brightly. Her hand touched Jon's elbow gently through his robe. "This way, Jon," she murmured more quietly, gesturing to the left, where a lopsided flight of chiseled stairs worn nearly smooth in their centers curved down along the wall.

"He's waiting," Rumarene said softly, arching a thin eyebrow over her narrow, inky eye-slit. "You'll want to meet him, Jon. I promise."

The Ambassador tightened his jaw and slid a dark glance out of the corner of his eye. "Thank you, madame, but I must doubt that. The number of Altmer anywhere I would actually _desire _to meet is exceedingly small, and – considering my treatment thus far at the Kemendelia's hands – the number _here _converges on zero." And, ignoring the sudden sad slant once more mirrored in the womer's eyes, he turned and marched stiffly away down the worn, stone stairs.

"You'll have to excuse me," the soil-sorcerer's voice drifted forth once more as Jon slipped between the wall and a jutting bookcase carved from half of a hollow rosewood trunk, the soft dipping footfalls of his frowning guides whispering a safe distance from his back, "but I was in the middle of a mythitexture-by-feel analysis. Not the tidiest bit of business. A moment, and I'll be _somewhat _more presentable." The deep voice was ever so slightly obscured by a white, tinkling song. As Jon reached the last bowed step and rounded the enormity of the knotty bookcase, he saw why.

It seemed at first glance a mere fountain, a poor attempt at whimsy in metal and stone, a broad, looming pillar of unmarked stone tiered in eight reservoirs of water visible only by its ripples, awkwardly plated and pointlessly adorned with the embarrassing bastards of an aspirant abstract metalsmith and a functionally impaired ceramicist. On second glance, though, the object hitherto classified as 'generic artistic flop' resolved itself into 'definite contraption;' the seeming adornments did in fact have their purpose – though what the purpose of twenty-five glass vials of various heights and radii, filled with soil just as varied in its presentation and in a similarly qualitative distribution of moisturization; why they should all be spinning and dipping and ratcheting around the pillar and into and out of the various reservoirs; how the bobbing gyroscope's irregular oscillations above the fountain's bubbling apex factored into the function of the whole was patently unclear.

There is no telling what the contraptions next degree of expression might have been for our Jon Urfe, that day, for on _his _third glance, the object resolved into its owner – of which fact's ultimate suitability no judgement has yet been passed.

"My apologies, Jon," said the sorcerer's water-wavered voice as he stepped out from beyond the contraption's whirling arms and misty spray. "I've interrupted you with my lack of preparation, right in the middle of a bang-up diatribe, and I know that's never well-received. Please, continue at your leisure." And with those words, two callused golden hands like bears' paws shaven and manicured reached down to swallow one of the human's in their implacable warmth, and Jon Urfe looked up, and up, and up into the face of the first soil sorcerer.

Had he been inclined to believe the old human propaganda of elven breeding programs and eugenics unto physical and mental homogeneity in the native population of Alinor, this mer's existence could either have strengthened or slain his suspicions; strengthened, if he believed that this Tsirelsyn truly _had _been born in the Dawn era and was evidence that _once, _at any rate, there had been greater variation amongst the elves; slain, if he did not believe the story of the elf's birth, and would thus conclude that, as individuals deviating from the ideal of Altmeri society were capable of holding high positions amidst their people, it was unlikely that the elves culled their brethren based upon physical differences. For there was difference, in this elf – though it would perhaps have gone unmentioned, if not unnoticed, in all Tamrielic societies save his own.

Most striking were the eyes; half velvet-glimmered black bled indistinguishably into the inky pupils, the other a ring a of mottled amber like those of a dog and rimmed in brilliant gold streaks, split straight in symmetrical sectoral heterochromia. They crinkled warmly down, vaguely unfocused, from a face like creased metal, smooth gold scraped by crow's feet and bent with lines of levity and gravity both round a firm, full-lipped mouth. Deep grooves ran like tears down his long cheeks; his was the face that laughs in sorrow. His brow sprouted innumerable braids like tiny plaited moonbeams, swept up and back from his forehead and falling down, down, down to the bottom of his back, splitting and weaving and rejoining each other all the way until it seemed more that he wore a netted headdress than hair. His torso stood bared before Jon's eyes, uncovered by cloth or any other article of clothing save a single black, withered amulet like a sunken snarl, strangely discomfiting in its nakedness quite apart from the surprise of such unprofessionalism in the supposed leader of the Kemendelia. His shoulders were bony but broad, his arms almost overlong for his body. He was muscled sparely, in wires and cords that showed the bone beneath; his ribs stood out faintly between his narrow pectorals. His nipples were tawny, and slightly puffy; his hips closer to the width of his shoulders than not, rounded like a woman's.

And he was massively tall; seven, eight feet, straight-spined, a veritable golden tower. Even in Alinor, where every Altmer was at least six feet tall and amply endowed to peer down their pointed noses at essentially everyone else on Tamriel, such stature was something remarkable. Looking up at him felt like standing at the base of a massive oak and trying to sight its topmost branch; Jon's eyes were just slightly above the mer's puckered navel.

The black-gold eyes jumped up from Jon's speechless stare and over his head, and the mer's full mouth burst into a grin, shedding stiff creases and ripples onto his cheeks.

"There they are!" his voice boomed out suddenly, vibrating through Jon's stretched throat. "There are my Youngest!"

He released his enveloping hold on the stunned human's hands and stepped past him, bare arms spread wide for the two giggling – _giggling _– womer to nestle themselves beneath against his chest as they came pattering down the smooth stairs.

"Ilandra!" he laughed, slapping his huge hand around her shoulder and lifting her effortlessly up to his lips. "Rumarene!" he chuckled, granting alike osculation to the shorter womer's puckered lips. "Why, it feels like I haven't seen you in years!"

"You saw us three weeks ago, Forgetful One," said a sparkling-eyed Rumarene, poking the mer's bare side. "That's hardly years."

"Three weeks?" rumbled Tsirelsyn, blinking. "Three weeks? Aye, me, but time flows ever on, and I grow ever worse at keeping its track. I become more and more of a fool's bet with every day."

"You're not a fool's bet," scoffed Ilandra, the small of her back curved against the soil-sorcerer's broad palm. "You're the soundest bet there is and you know it! You just say that to make us visit more often."

His lips curled mischievously. "I don't know what you mean," he said. "I would do no such thing. _I'm _not the one who goes about stealing people's underclothes just to –"

Jon cleared his throat. Tsirelsyn broke off abruptly, looking naievely surprised.

"I don't know which particular subclass of twisted intimate deviancy the three of engage in during your idle hours," he began quietly, squaring his heels and clasping the handle of his portmanteau neatly before him in hands blotchy with the pink and white of intensely pressured fury, "but I _do _know that I have no desire to be a part of it, even merely by association. So if you would care to extricate your barely clothed self from the arms of what looks like a segment of your harem, there are words that must be said to you before I can in good conscience resign myself to my fate with your… _Kemendelia." _

The eyes of all three drooped down into identical aspects of soft sadness. They watched him for a long moment, looking silently and simply into his stubbornly cold face. Then the mer slid two nudging glances to either side, and the womer nodded up at him, lips folded in between their teeth. He gave them each a pat on their robed waists as they slipped away back up the smooth stairs, then turned back to Jon, heterochromic eyes still crushing in sadness.

"Come, Ambassador," he said. "I will show you to a room more suitable for our discussion."

"Discussion?" coughed Jon, hiding a bitter laugh. "No, that was not how I had envisioned it. No, what I had envisioned was _myself, _Ambassador from the College of Whispers, demanding from _you, _supposed leader of this patchy morass of unprofessionalism, an explanation as to why I was greeted at your facility with public humiliation; why I was accosted without a chance for explanation; why I was stripped nude in the full public view by a crew of domesticated goblins!"

His entire body gave a quiver as his voice peaked; his booted foot gave a tiny, involuntary stamp. The Altmer only watched, hands hanging limply, eyelids heavy and half folded. Jon drew a steadying breath.

"No," he went on more quietly, "no, I do not see this as a discussion. I do not wish to 'discuss' with you. I do not even wish to converse with you, but there I must make some concessions, if only because I have no alternative. The only thing I wish," he bit off coldly, "is to hear an explanation and apology for how your people have thus far treated your 'guest,' for why I was made to _sleep in a field _and then humiliated publicly to boot. Now explain."

A soft sigh whistled out between Tsirelsyn's lips. His huge head shook gently, twisting and shifting his web of white braids.

"My dear Ambassador Urfe," he breathed, "you wish my personal apology for your poor reception? Very well – I am sorry that you have suffered, as I am sorry for all who suffer. But neither I nor Ilandra nor Rumarene nor anyone else of the Kemendelia was anything more than superficially the cause of your suffering, as you would see it."

"As I would see it?" spluttered Jon in outrage. "_I _saw an empty, absent greeting when I arrived last night! _I _saw your 'Rumarene' order your goblin slaves to strip me of my last vestige of dignity! _I _see _quite clearly _that your Kemendelia is the cause of my suffering, _sir!" _

"Ah, Ambassador," Tsirelsyn said, blinking steadily down at the human, long arms crossed over his bare chest, "with such words does all grievance grow. I will not argue with you, for it is some comfort to have someone along the eventual chain to blame. Very well. The Kemendelia has caused you some suffering, by necessity."

"By _necessity?" _growled Jon disbelievingly. "How is any suffering _necessary, _much less that which is as senseless as my own?"

A broad, wry smile creased the Altmer's cheeks; the black-gold eyes compressed to glimmers part sad, part amused, and part hopeful. "In the sense you mean, Ambassador, none is – and I would ask that you remember that. In another sense, though, its necessity thus far is an absolute of existence."

"I do not – I do not care about your philosophical quibbles!" Jon hissed. "You are trying to draw me into a discussion, but I have already told you I have no desire to debate with a glorified farm hand who has still not learned how to dress appropriately to his station! The only thing I wish is to understand whyyourpeopledidwhattheydid! Can you not tell me that?" His hands spasmed on the handle of his bag as he bored a pop-eyed hole in the Altmer's forehead with his glare.

"Who ever truly reaches understanding, Ambassador? If I answer your single question today, you will only become more unsatisfied, more filled with questions. Is that what you want, Ambassador?"

"By the Nine! I know what I want! Just answer the question!"

"No," the elf answered, suddenly firm, "no, you do _not _know what it is you want, though it is good that you want it. You do not know, but I will grant it to you regardless. My people did what they did, Ambassador Urfe," his deep voice rumbled smoothly, "out of love. Love for the land, yes, but that in itself encompasses a love for _you, _as well. You see, you had obtained some fragments of soil and pedogenic material about your person during your forbidden, unfortunate overnight stay in our fields – which, you should understand, was your greeting from the Kemendelia because we did not know you were coming. We had to recollect those bits of soil so that we could restore them to their proper place in the network."

Jon's neck tightened like an overwound clock; his head quivered as he stared up at the massive, shirtless Altmer. "Dirt?" he whispered. "Dirt? I was stripped naked by a crew of goblins for the sake of a few bits of dirt?"

"Not dirt, Ambassador," Tsirelsyn began soothingly, "not dirt, but –"

"_It was dirt!" _The cry broke like a shriek from Jon's white lips.

"_No, _Ambassador!" Tsirelsyn's voice boomed suddenly, raised from its quiet even tone for the first time since Jon had entered the room. "It is _not _dirt. Dirt is dead, Ambassador, the skeleton of our concerns, the failure of our art. Our craft deals with_ soil, _with _life. _Dirt is the darkness beneath one's fingernails; soil is the womb of myth. The difference could – probably – not be more profound."

"Soil or dirt," spat Jon, "it does not satisfy me. You have an entire island of it. Why should the barest fraction I had accumulated have had enough significance to warrant the treatment I received?"

Tsirelsyn gave a chuckling, sighing laugh. "You see, Ambassador? What did I say? Questions on questions, and you are less satisfied now than when you began! But to answer, still: you must understand, Ambassador, that the soil system is a network, a highly interdependent collection of factors. No piece of it is insignificant. And it is so, so delicate. It can be destroyed even by mere foot traffic. We cannot afford to lose or neglect any particle of what we have – which is why we had to retrieve those pieces you had removed."

Our stubbornly irate Ambassador but pursed his lips in angry skepticism. "Do you really expect me to believe that?" he drawled. "Really? I realize that you probably don't have as much experience in lying to humans as some of your brethren, given your lowered position, but surely even you could think of something more convincing than 'the dirt is fragile and we must protect it at all costs.'"

"It is no lie. This is the truth."

"No, it is _not," _snapped Jon harshly. "I may only have lived a fraction of the time you have, I may still be an infant by your people's standards, and I may only have been in this horrible place for a few months, but I know that _nothing _you have said thus far was _anything _an Altmer would say unless he had some strong agenda to force him into such ridiculous behavior as yours. What were you looking for? Why let me rot outside before you subjected me to strip-search? Looking for magic from the College? What was it?"

Tsirelsyn frowned, shaking his head and looking over Jon's head as he stepped forward. "There is no profit in this conversation for either of us if you will not believe me. You understand us very, very little, Jon." The looming golden body retreated behind the whirling fountain.

"Of course I don't!" Jon exclaimed as he followed the elf back and around to a desk chiseled from the stone and cluttered with an overwhelming amount of scribed cloth, piled parchment, and broken glassware. "How could a human possibly understand an elf – oh, my apologies: an _Altmer." _

"I will speak to you again, Ambassador," answered Tsirelsyn coolly, seated at the desk and eyes nevertheless level with the human's, his broad hands busying themselves with a scrap of parchment and a simple, ink-stained piece of sharpened bamboo, "when you have regained more of your normal composure. Until then – you were sent here to learn, were you not? Then I invite you to learn. Apply yourself to any facet of the Kemendelia's doings as you see fit; I will give orders that you are to be accommodated."

"I little know that I will be able to _learn _anything from such a society," Jon said snidely, "but I will do what I can with the material I am given."

Tsirelsyn's eyes slipped momentarily closed. "Ah, my mother," he whispered under his breath, "that we should have been born on an island. Such sorrows it has wrought." He shook his head once more, tiny white braids shifting across his golden back.

"I hope you will find something of worth among us, Ambassador," he went on, more loudly. "I think you will, despite your current state. Now, take this," he said, holding up the parchment on which he had been writing and placing it in Jon's distaste-cautious fingers, "and give it to the goblin you will find waiting for you outside my chambers. He is to be your servant, for the duration of your stay here. He will guide you to your quarters, and see that you are settled comfortably and well fed."

"I am to be attended by a goblin?" Jon asked coldly. "Unworthy of an Altmeri servant, am I?"

"Jon," rumbled the ancient sorcerer, split eyes staring straight into the human's, disturbingly large and clear with the truth of the elf's size made evident by proximity, "if you look for an insult in everything, you will find it. You are served by a goblin because that is what we have; we put our people to better uses out here than they do in the urban districts."

A disbelieving sneer burgeoned on Jon's lips as he met the Altmer's eyes unblinkingly, and the inked message crumpled in his tightening fist.

"Go, Ambassador," the Altmer breathed at last, a gentle rumble like a cat's purr or distant thunder. "We will talk more, later, when you have come back from the city of Alinor more fully. Go. You will feel better for the rest."

"Should I ever be so lucky as to return to Alinor city and my College's embassy there," Jon answered with soft cruelty, "you can be sure that I will not return for conversation with one such as yourself; an undressed agriculturalist with pretensions of sorcery."

And with that, Jon withdrew; a stiff, measured pace around the strange Altmer's clutter and back up the worn stairs, back up to the narrow ledge with its high, splinter-narrow door in the striated egg-walls, back up near the ceiling's apex where the soft black drapes sprang from their gathering ring and slid-caressed the walls. He withdrew, and Tsirelsyn watched him go with his heavy, mirror-split gaze, his overlarge hands on his sea-silked thighs, massive skinny chest bowed slightly inward over his wide hips, at ease in his own skin and its apparel, untouched by the content of the human's insults but deeply saddened by their motive emotion. But _that, _that genuine hurt sympathy, _that _Jon did not see as he clipped the ancient door closed behind him and handed the crumpled note to the hunched bundle of satin that was Falif, the goblin awaiting him in the diffuse ochre glow of the subterranean garden; did not even come close to its realization as the short, limping figure led him away into dark, irregular corridors like the pores of earth, breathing moist musk, a scentless crystalline censer swaying from his gloved fingers. He saw not the faintest glimmer of the cruelty of his behavior or the pain he had caused the soil-sorcerer with his words, had not the dimmest glimpse of the source of the Altmer's differences in behavior and feature, or the possibility that he had found already what he had sought all along: a group of elves who would genuinely accept him. No. No, as Jon lay, stiff and staring on the round bed of the unadmittably comfortable room to which the goblin, Falif, had led him, he was not filled with his characteristic eagerness for the new day, but with a dull, aching emptiness, a dry burning in his throat. He did not plan what he would do or which questions he would ask, but shuddered with dread and disgust at the thought of leaving the room for aught. He did not puzzle and marvel and gush over the wonderful new strangenesses of the Kemendelia Altmer thus far, but lacerated himself with the utter piteous disregard he supposed to be behind their familiarity with him, a human. No, as Jon lay there, fists clenching in his sea-silk sheets, his mind saw only despair, degradation, and impotence.

Pitiful, you say. Pathetic. A senseless fool, you say, to spit in the face of perhaps the only High Elf in Alinor who might – _might – _be worthy of legitimate relationships. What a soft, weak little man, you say, to fall in on himself over just a night out-of-doors and a bit of wind about his privates; a childish fool, to conduct himself before his hosts as you have seen. And to you I say: you have not yet lived as Jon Urfe had lived. It was not the Kemendelia that broke our linguistic magician. Do not hasten towards judgement.

But, come now, you answer, surely circumstances cannot excuse _all _of his conduct's blind childishness. He should have been able to maintain _some _measure of perspective – it is utterly pathetic that he should lose all hope over so little! I can but smile a soil-sorcerer's smile, at that. You are correct, in the gross understanding, yes; for it was indeed a failing in Jon – if any of us can every truly be said to have failings – that he could view but one side of life at a time, had only one lens to tint his perspective. Life, to him, was either all good at once or all bad at once; there was no meeting of the two. Mostly, of course, this was a blessing to him, for mostly his life had been a bright one, the dark moments few and far between – but when they came, they came over him with a desolation unmatched. This is why Jon could hold no good up to the light as he lay there, brooding, why his entire world seemed to have collapsed in on him; he was incapable of the perception of coexistent duality, ignorant of the principle of the horizon. But this is no explanation, no excuse, you insist, just a description of his weakness. So he was born that way; so are we all born with flaws, and must judge based on those flaws regardless of their arbitrarity. Jon Urfe's weakness remains condemned.

But Jon Urfe had not been born with his 'weakness,' with his 'fault,' if we must use such terms; no, Jon Urfe's particular one-sided blindness was the result of an _event. _And can you condemn a man for what has happened to him without his consent, merely by the vagaries of chance and fate? Can you judge the leper, the smash-skulled halfwit, the jaded jilted lover? Their 'illnesses,' their 'failings,' their 'weaknesses' all seem disgusting, condemnable at first sight – but probe for the cause, and you will find that which could just as easily have happened to you.

And this is how I would have you think of Jon. For just as the hard-hearted old bachelor's cruelties have youthful passion and cold rejection at their root, buried in history, so too is there that about Jon which you do not know, that which makes clear the essential necessity of his behavior that day in Arbasdiil, just as it explains why he cried half as many tears as anyone else would have done into his silken pillow that lonely night. In your world, your Nirn, sensitive and enslaved as she is to the power of the symbol and metaphor, it should only be expected that Jon see but one side of the situation.

For Jon Urfe had only one eye.


	6. Chapter 5

**Chapter V**

Dispatch to the Assemblage of Provincial Oversight  
College of Whispers, Miscarcand Cynosure  
Dynamistographic Transcription of Urfe's Seventh Harmonic Spectra-Sphere  
Date: 23 Mid Year, 4E XXX

The Assemblage will excuse me in advance for the derogatory tenor of this report. It was, as always, my intent to maintain a strict level of forbearance and understanding toward the natives in my analysis, but, after four weeks' exposure to Arbasdiil's agricultural practices – assumedly exemplary of the whole of Alinor, as Arbasdiil is the oldest and largest of the Kemendelia's soli – I am forced to conclude that Altmeri land management is in no way superior to the management of the meanest farmer in the Empire, and in many cases is below even that poor standard. I think I am safe in saying that it is one of the most disturbing of the many disconcerting facets of life in Alinor – for any human tourist, really, but without a doubt for the human agriculturalist. The blatant elvish ignorance of the most simple and fundamental practices of land management is purely astounding, even to me; I am can only what the impact would be on one of our farmers, if he could simply take one glance over the fields in this valley of the Summerset Isle, as I have done. What greater horror could there be for one of our fine, tidy growers than to look out across a 'field' and see plants growing as they do here in Alinor, hodge-podge and willy-nilly, unconfined by even the attempt at rows, in soil that has not been broken and tilled in centuries. It is like walking alongside some grazeland in Hammerfell – except that Alinor does not know grassy species, of course – everything growing every which way, falling across each other and presumably interpollinating, seeds sprouting where the parent fruit falls, without any visible directive. One wonders, in truth, how these pretenders at farming manage to harvest anything at all – assuming, of course, that they even manage to produce a crop above negligibility.

Perhaps equally disturbing to the human lover of land is the terrace system, which I mentioned in my previous report. There is no such thing as a 'slope,' in Alinor, only steppes walled in white stone and overflowing with unregulated vegetation. To look out over the land, to see the hillsides chiseled and flattened, is enough to disturb the heart of even the most urbane of humans; but to the elves, it is nothing. They feel only satisfaction to look out over their isle and see it entirely subjugated to their artifice, Kynareth's beauty nearly completely subsumed in their tyranny of line, almost reveling in their inversion of the natural balance of ordination and irregularity. It seems almost intentionally heretical, blasphemous, in truth, the exactness with which the Altmer have misapplied these two extremes of relation with the natural world, allowing Kynareth's unregulated chaos to run rampant amongst their crops when they should order them by Zenithar's wise wiles, ravaging the land into a horror of right angles when it is Kynareth's curves that are most bountiful. It begs one to wonder whether those deities most high which are so common throughout the Empire – under many names – garner even a few words of worship in the city-isle to _any _naming.

But the simplistic ignorance and absurd wrongheadedness of Altmeri agriculture goes far beyond even such ridiculous misapplications as these. Indeed, I am almost convinced that the Altmer _do not manage their land at all, _as humans would deem it, beyond the long-since completed travesty of terraces; for I have thus far been unable to find any signs of the most recent and productive advances in human agronomy, despite that one would assume the Altmer, whose culture has been the model of Imperial culture for most of history, to have advanced beyond our own methods. Tillage is forbidden by law, as is irrigation of any kind, alchemical treatments to eliminate pestiferous vegetation, insects, and mammalia, and even the use of loaded vehicles directly upon fields; unheard of are such practices as crop rotation, fertilization with animal manure, and the planting of a single crop over any large area. I have yet to find a single instance of actual active intervention in what goes by the name of agriculture here. To further baffle and disgust the human farmer, I must confirm that I was indeed correct in my earlier posturation; this is indeed a 'city-isle,' no part of which is not given over either to architectural or agricultural districts, or both at once. The elves have no sense of restraint with their backward attempts at cultivation, no respect for the inherent needs of the land; where the human farmer understands Kynareth's cycles, growing only a few years on any given piece of earth before allowing it to succeed back to the forest and moving on to carve a new plot from the woods, the elves leave nothing, utilizing every hectare of available space for some sort of production, without cessation for centuries, assumedly. Considering the rapid decreases in yield our own farmers experience after just a few years of cultivation and the resultant need to allow the ground to rest and rejuvenate, I can only conclude that this terror of elvish ignorance has dramatically crippled their capacity for production from what it might once have been. Ironically enough, the unnecessary extent of agricultural expansion in Alinor led to its own indispensability; with such degraded land as this, I can only assume that the Altmer are forced to cultivate all available to pool enough marginal yields to feed their people.

All of this begs the question, then, of _why. _Why the Kemendelia? Why have an organization devoted to agriculture if the principal management strategy is inactivity and neglect? What is the purpose of it all? And that, I cannot yet answer; I will need more than a month among these pathetic, backward agromancers to fathom out their true purpose, if indeed such exists beyond the desolation of the Nirn these elves so despise.

And, yes, I am indeed now among the Kemendelia, and have been for the past four weeks since my last report. I am stationed in Arbasdiil, the largest and oldest of the so called 'soli,' as the agricultural hubs of Alinor are known. A strange place, in its own way, though of course entirely different from the city of Alinor. The facility is primarily subterranean, at the bottom of one of the island's largest interior valleys, and astoundingly unrefined in aspect, for an elvish dwelling, its chambers like caves, its corridors tunnels spreading like root hairs below the terraced fields. One would be amiss to assume that all Altmeri structures blaze in glassy beauty, of course, but the sheer _rawness _of the solum's construction gives one to wonder whether it was actually of Altmeri construction, originally. There are goblins here, as the ancient accounts tell; perhaps they once held power great enough to build such things, before the Altmer came to enslave them? Certainly it is to the deep tunnels that my goblin keeper retreats each night. Perhaps there is even more evidence of such a ruined, troglodytic society, further down. There is no telling how far the passages penetrate; anything could be down there.

Not least of the solum's oddities is its owner, the leader of the so-called 'edaphomancers' and of all agriculture in the area; the Altmer who is called Tsirelsyn, and titled – and do not ask me why – the Son. Purported to have been born in the Dawn era, before linear history, he is _the _most atypical Altmer I have ever met – which isn't particularly saying much, when it comes to these homogenous elves, but is none the lessened in its impact. Where all other Altmer fuss and preen over their presentation and are not to be seen under the public eye without their most flattering apparel – a barely noticeable distinction, considering the rigid regulations keeping most of them nearly identically attired – this 'soil-sorcerer' received me lacking a shirt, like some field hand just in from the harvest. Where the Thalmor and the rest of Alinor ringed me and the other Ambassadors round with strictures on our travels and activities, so far advanced is _this _elf's arrogance and contempt for our kind that he thinks us so utterly incapable of consequential action that he does not even bother himself with my movements! Some of this may be part of another quirk, of course, for this Tsirelsyn further defies convention by disdaining the obsessive micromanagement so common elsewhere in Alinor, giving his subordinates free reign to do as they see fit as he pursues who-knows-what in and out of his eclectic laboratory. He is the leader of the Kemendelia, yes, but the uninformed would be hard pressed to tell; I myself have not seen him since my arrival here… though I did his daughter.

Self-determination is the rule in Arbasdiil. Everyone – edaphomancers, agromancers, and all the other functionaries with whom I am not yet familiar – simply acts as they see fit, taking whatever steps they think necessary to accomplish some individual goal, regardless of what anyone else may be doing. There are no meetings, no discussion, no plans; only random, undirected action, a meandering morass of individualities. I cannot, of course, support such an organization, but I have been forced to adhere to it, as there is no one here to direct me to where I should attend for the greatest benefit. So I have gone and done what I wilt, these last few weeks, accompanied only by my attendant goblin, Falif. Primarily our excursions have been to the roads above the fields – to enter the fields directly, on foot, as I have been… informed, is forbidden to all save the edaphomancers themselves on the dubious claim that anyone else would 'degrade the soil' simply by walking upon it. Purely ridiculous, of course; this is just one more excuse stemming from the elvish obsession with purity in their sustenance, intended to prevent me from 'contaminating' their food. A pointless restriction, but I have no wish to relive the punishment for its transgression, so adhere to it I do. While most of the glassy bridges are quite elevated, all the valley's fields are criss-crossed with a network of smaller footpaths just a few feet above the vegetation line, and from these I and my attendant have been able to gather some small number of observations on the particularities of Altmeri agriculture; much of this information the Assemblage has already received.

There is very little more to impart in that way, I'm afraid. As I have said, actual management activities, if they exist, are few and far between, as I have never yet been witness to visible intervention on the part of a resident of Arbasdiil – they all of them maintain a faced of furious occupation, rushing here and there in an imitation of industry (it seems obvious to me that it must be an imitation, for my past experience with the Altmer in Alinor has shown them a paramountly inactive and unproductive race; a consequence, no doubt, of their vaunted longevity), but none of their supposed 'action' has had any effect that I could observe. I am equally stymied in my studies of the objects of cultivation as I have been in the means; my restriction from entry into the fields themselves precludes any detailed analysis of Altmeri crops, and as I have been abandoned to my own devices by my hosts, the Assemblage will understand that direct query is of but little use. The only thing I _can _say with some certainty on the matter is a singular peculiarity that has shown itself in every field I have peered down upon thus far; the absence of a monocotyledonous crops, or grasses.

Not an insignificant observation, considering that most of Tamriel's societies are centered upon the use of grains from such plants – wheat, rice, maize, millet, etc. etc. depending upon the region. They are fundamental staples of consumption, with us, so their absence from elvish cultivation is truly puzzling. There must be _some _form of grain grown in these fields, for I have myself consumed breads and other such dough-based goods during my stay here, and they are not absent from Altmeri cuisine, either. To my knowledge, only wheat flour possesses the viscoelastic properties that facilitate the formation of a functional and texturally palatable dough, but perhaps the Altmer have identified something else – Kynareth forbid, but maybe the Altmer have _created _something else. Their synthetic instinct is certainly strong enough, and I think we all know that such feats of vegetative identity mutagenesis have been theorized even by some of our own, less cautious mages; it is quite within the broad boundaries of Altmeri sorcery.

But regardless of this speculation, the fact remains that to date I have yet to see a single blade of grass in this isle's etched hillsides. Instead, the rural districts of the cityscape are dominated by a variety of woody and herbaceous stemmed plants; tangles of dark ivy with leaves like the blades of an elven spear, creeping along the white terraces and up the black glass pylons holding these streets and paths suspended, spouting here and there in spiraling, periwinkle inflorescences and setting fruit like juniper berries; a group of proud and boisterous bushes thrusting thick stalk-stands ten feet above the ground with reflective leaves like stars, broad as my chest; feathery herbs growing almost exclusively from tall, heaped mounds, grey-green and fluttering, gasping in soft bursts of yellow and orange and white; strang, spinning-leaved stalks covered in an iridescent white fuzz; waxy coated bushes with tough-looking green fruits; square-stemmed bursts of teal flowers, their mint so aromatic I can smell it even from ten feet above. All mixed together without reason or plan, of course, without any though to what would grow best where, or most conveniently. The Kemendelia simply lets their crops grow as they wilt. It does not make it an easy task to sort out one from the other, and no doubt I have missed a thousand individual species in my observations thus far; the Assemblage should take my accounts as descriptions of general trends of Summerset's flora, not as specific classification. That much, I fear, shall have to wait until I may find a reliable source; small hope of discovering a strand-terminal to the Library out here, though it would be best to access the Altmer's own records on the subject.

This concludes my report. Before I withdraw from interface, however, I will take the time to submit a request to the Assemblage. If possible, please establish direct, two-way contact with me here in Arbasdiil, as a small amount of direction in my investigation would not go amiss. My senior apprentice should be able to worry out the method and transmit the Assemblage's message; tell him to use the thirty-second spectra-sphere, attuned to the third in the empamagnetic range of soft ideoplasmic radiation.

As always, this is

Jon Urfe

Specialist in Poly-Spectral Comprehension Techniques and Phenomena

Collegiate Ambassador to the School of Thoughts and Calculations and the Aldmeri Dominion in Alinor

College of Whispers


	7. Chapter 6

**Chapter VI**

You know this day; the sun a bronze, oiled god steam-slick on the horizon, dusk panting night's musk in your ear, the air salt-heavy with suspended sweat - the solvent of time's sublimation from the wet earth, wavering and warbling over the reveling fields. Summer's tongue down your throat, and lungs trembling around its still supersaturation. Jon's hands quaver on the radiating glass, and there are yours clasped alongside his, your back against his chest, choking in eternally unrealized coexistence on the same conjugation of solubilized tensions. This is the day. You know it.

His booted feet shifted on the narrow bridge's glass beams, hot and sore from yet another long, lonely trek across the net of burning copper that strangled the air in the melting sun. His head drooped over the flexible, corded rail, eye pressed half closed with the weight of the heat, brooding down on the tangled, haphazard vegetation below. The silk patch itched over his empty left socket like his robes, sticky between his shoulder blades. A few feet away stood the goblin that had been Jon's only companion, when he suffered company at all, through the four weeks of his stay in Arbasdiil. Stocky, with thick shoulders and arms hanging with enormous gloved paws like clubs, hunched forward and absolutely still, clear blue eyes staring unceasingly at the human from the narrow slit in his bulbous head shroud. His tight white uniform blazed blindingly with the combined light of the setting sun and the bridge's dazzling refractions.

So had they passed most of their time since Jon had finally mustered enough courage to leave his underground chambers and brave the journey back to the surface and its blessed fresh breath; the goblin staring without cease in its satin uniform, hunching and limping along behind a silent, aloof Jon Urfe over the interlocked network of bridges and aerial roads spanning the unending fields around Arbasdiil's ruffled egress, through the long, sweltering days of Alinor's early summer, tailing the human Ambassador as Jon struggled to hide from the immutable reality of his situation.

And hide _was _what he did, using his endless independent tours through the fields to convince himself that he did something useful, just as he had accused the bustling elves of the Kemendelia of doing in his latest report to the College of Whispers. He could not tell the Assemblage of the intricacies of Altmeri agricultural management because he had made absolutely no active effort to determine what those might be, beyond his distanced observations of the behavior of the elves, their fields, and what he could and could not see therein. He had made no attempt to actually _discuss _the matter with any one of the many Altmer who watched his daily ascent through the solum's cavity with a curious reserve, had put forth no efforts to establish an informative relationship with _anyone, _much less anyone knowledgeable. When he told the Assemblage that irrigation was forbidden by law, he spoke from pure speculation, extrapolating from the practice's absence and the Altmeri obsession with legality a legislative measure on the matter. He had not even conversed with his goblin servant beyond the occasional terse command or reprimand. On the contrary; he had actively avoided those elves – edaphomancers, primarily, from their bare feet – who had initially attempted to introduce themselves and incorporate him into the life of the solum. He lived in self-imposed solitude steeped in wounded pride, resentment, and a consciousness of the immaturity of his behavior. It had been a month since he had touched another person.

He lifted his head, pushing a thick sigh out into the resisting air. His eye slid shut against the sunset; the lids bled tangles of backlit capillary traceries. His face hummed with gilding warmth; he could feel the entirety of his skin twitch with his heart's pacing. No, with its racing; its sudden thudding in the roof of his mouth, its causeless excitation. His hands tingled; this is the day; and why? They trembled without reason against the rail; this is the day; could it be heatstroke? THIS IS THE DAY. He opened his eye.

Someone moved in the field below; distant, swimming in the horizon's heat haze, a twitching blur smeared in with the field's jade and the sunset's amber slump. He squinted; his through caught tighter on the thick air. He had never seen someone out in the fields; as he had told the Assemblage, such was allowed only to the soil sorcerers, as his goblin attendant had informed him briefly, but even they did not seem to utilize their privilege. They spent far more time below the ground than they did upon it. He tightened his hands on the hot rail, frowning. An edaphomancer was the last thing with which he wanted to deal. But his feet did not move. The figure came slowly closer, slipping between the tall mounds of cool-clustered vegetation. A womer, in a simple morning-glory's violet slip, her shoulders and arms bare. The sun settled lower into its bath at her back. Jon watched in suspended silence. She did not see him; she looked only to her feet, her face downturned and curtained – literally – by sheets of copper-rippled brown hair woven so intricately together it seemed like a sheet of silk, draped across her bare shoulders and down her back to her knees. One more degree of descent, and shadow levered the horizon; the womer lost in darkness. Five slow breaths; fifty, like sucking down warm milk.

And then there you are with Jon Urfe, and there she is beneath you, in the coruscating radiance of the bridge's stubborn sunset, haloed in twine gilded in light – and she has stopped. Stilled, and staring yet straight down at her pigeon-toed golden feet, cushioned on a patch of soft clover. She hasn't seen you, she hasn't seen Jon, she hasn't, she _hasn't_, and you'll both be safe and happy if she _doesn't, _if she doesn't, if she doesn't…

If she doesn't throw back her soft square chin and show you her throat and the twisted amber amulet rested in its hollow, if she doesn't surprise you with her own surprise-sculpted brow, her ripe mouth, her flushed cheeks, if she doesn't look at you with those huge, heavy-lidded eyes like the soft flesh of a peach, doesn't blink at you in a complete heterochromia of black and gold.

But she does. She does, and holds you there as she holds Jon; silent, stiff, staring. And then – released, and she moves on, without speech, without gesture, without a single twitch in her blank, firm-mouthed face; on and away beneath the bridge and through the field beyond in the same silent, slipping way. And Jon stared down without the sight of even one eye at the empty patch of clover where she had stood. His hands were rigid on the rail – _and how now are yours? _It was minutes before he moved.

He turned slowly from the field, looking into the waiting blue of his goblin attendant's staring eyes. He tried to speak; his tongue stuck on his teeth. Words were a struggle.

"Do you know who that womer was, Falif?" he croaked. It was the first question he had formed in four weeks. It was also the first time he had truly spoken to his servant, or called him by name.

The goblin did not move, but an answer slipped out past the cloth covering his mouth, regardless. "Wery well, wizud."

Jon gave a twitching nod. "And what is her name? Who is she?"

"Wery import, her. Tha Motha, thay calls."

"The Mother? Does that mean… Tsirelsyn's mother?"

The white-wreathed head shook slowly. "Not such, wizud. Tha Motha is as they calls, not as _is. _The Syn is hern's fatha. She is hisn's dotta."

"Of… course," replied Jon slowly, confused but unwilling to ask for further clarification. "And her name?"

"Hern's called Cehseekye, wizud."

The human made no reply save to nod, squinting away over the goblin's shoulder at the figure nearly completely lost in the distance of the shadowy field. A few moments later he roused himself, shaking and rubbing his head.

"I have been in the sun too often and too long, I fear," he sighed. "I feel a little… faint."

"Betta not come heres, morro."

Jon nodded. "Yes, you're right, I think. A rest would do me some good, though I lack for occupation."

The goblin blinked. "Dinna, too. Wizuds needs to feed, too."

"Too right you are, Falif," the human answered with a tiny smile. "Too right. Well, enough of this; let's turn in."

"Wery good, wizud," Falif replied quickly. He turned, looking back over his shoulder at the human's single eye. "Hurry. Gunna make you's some good soups. It helps the sickiness."

"I'm not sure I want a _cure_," Jon breathed wryly, stepping after his lumbering guide. "Chances are that I'll recover on my own. But the offer is appreciated, nonetheless."

Just a shrug of one lumpy shoulder in response, as though the goblin had some presentiment of Jon's chances at a spontaneous recovery. He set off, quite quickly even with his limp, and Jon followed him away up the glass path. Dusk went before them, the sunset finally catching up to the glassy veins; they chased its dry-running light west, back toward the solum.

Soft sighs over the darkened fields; a mother's warm, tired breath over her children. Stars rubbing their eyes and yawning awake over the mountains; darkling beetles flicking their elytra on broad leaf landings; and the surface-tense mist precipitating out of the cooling air, little by little, condensing on green matter and trickling back down to the soil's pull, ready to rise once more.

This is the day. Know it.


	8. Chapter 7

**Chapter VII**

I don't – I don't – I can't believe I'm doing this. It's… not something I do. Talk to myself? No. It's so… I don't know. Awkward, I guess. So embarrassing, if somebody else should ever find it. I mean, I've attuned my Mangler to my private dynamistograph back in Cyrodiil, and my chambers in Miscarcand are locked, but… it's not secure. Someone could find this. But, damn it all, it's been too long. I've too much bottled up. I need to talk, and the Assemblage doesn't seem inclined to heed my request for a bit of human contact – that, or they've bungled it entirely and ruined my machine. In which case whatever reports I etch in the future will be for naught; but let's not think too much on that.

That last report. Gods, but what a fake I felt, writing that. You'd think I was getting along swimmingly, going by that thing, whatever warnings I gave. A little difficulty gathering information; what of it? Hardly. I haven't… I haven't really _spoken _with anyone – aside from Falif – since my arrival in this damned hole. I should, I know. I should just swallow my pride and get out there, and no matter about the condescending kindness of these barbaric 'soil-sorcerers.' But I just haven't been able to… I go out, I walk, and as soon as I see one of them my whole body starts to tense, their pity-laden voices start running through my mind, and I can't. I turn away, and run.

Or at least that's how it has been so far. Since yesterday… maybe it will change. I guess that's why I'm doing this. Maybe if I get it out, even just to myself, it will help. Maybe. It's just – these Altmer. Gods, but you can't do a _thing _with them. Absolutely nothing. You look at an elf, and the elf peers back down its nose at you, and you can just tell that no matter what you say or do you'll never be more than a squawling babe in their eyes. They live so long, see so much, and think they know better than humanity for it – which is of course absurd; there is always room to grow, to learn. That the Altmer believe otherwise is proof of their own blindness and the ultimate triumph of Man. They can't even hear what we say; we move and change and adapt so swiftly to the world's mutations that their stagnated minds see only chaos, instead of the true sublimity of our suitability to the world.

These 'edaphomancers' are no better. Urban Altmer – well, and all the rest of the Kemendelia except its soil sorcerers – sneer and insult and ignore their human visitors with complete disregard for our feelings as fellow intelligent beings, but the gall of their behavior is as nothing beside that of the edaphomancers. Most Alinorian Altmer hate us in their arrogance; the soil sorcerers pity us, and their self-righteous, long-suffering attempts to show compassion, to 'improve' me and mitigate my supposed ignorance have been more insulting than anything the Thalmor ever said or did.

Gods, but this isn't helping. I'm just reinforcing my own resentments. And Mara knows it's not just what I've been going through since I came here that I need to move past. Is that what I'm trying to do? Is that why I'm doing this? Keeping a trans-oceanic diary, of all things. To talk to myself, when I have no one else. No, no, to provide a record of the emotional perils of life in Alinorian society, for the eventual analysis and use of my colleagues in Ingenious Illusion back in Cyrodiil. To ward future Ambassadors against my pitfalls. Yes. Yes, those are good reasons. Sound reasons. _Load of dung reasons._Come on, Jon. You know why you're doing this.

You're doing this because you had a dream. You had a dream, when you haven't had a dream for over a decade. And talking about something, anything, is better than sitting alone in your sweaty blankets with the old terror bunched and flickering in your eye, rolling my Mangler in your hands in your pathetic, convulsive attempts at comfort. That is why you're doing this.

But nothing for it but to go on, on, on, to talk about _something, _even if it's not what's really on my mind, because to talk about _that _would make it only too real. So onward, and start from the beginning, and who knows? Maybe it will help me 'move past' my resentments toward Alinor. I doubt it, but maybe. Maybe. Now let us begin.

'The Skeining City,' they call Alinor on the seas. A strange moniker, it seems at first exposure, and not at all suited to the tales one hears of the place. Then one learns a bit more of the metropolis' particulars, and the name is suddenly lessened in its unsuitability. Alinor lies on the west coast of the main Summerset, guarded by the Nenepalla Reef that parallels that stretch of shore, a few miles into the ocean. It is this reef that is and has been the city's greatest asset, not only militarily, as its intricacies necessitate the service of an Altmeri guide to safely make port, but economically and culturally as well. The Reef hosts a plethora of oceanic life, which bounty the elves have never been shy of exploiting; coral for their jewelry and the minisculely toothed pestles so sought after by Tamriel's alchemists; the rare mirror pearls, whose unending layers have been said to provide the only objective reflections of self; the oil of the cephalomer; the hides of sharks and dolphins; tuna and squid for the sea-tuned palate of the elves; luxuries and staples in innumerable variety and indiminishable surfeit. The goods Alinor draws from this endless aquatic mine are distributed throughout the Isles, and have made it the single most influential of the Summersets' urbanities for most of history.

One creature looms above all others of the Reef's inhabitants, however, in its import to Alinorian influence, and, indeed to Altmeri culture as a whole; the clepsydra, or sea-serpent. These are not the fabled beasts of the deeps, whose solitary habits rarely bring them so near the surface and so close to the shore at once, but their their much smaller – albeit still dangerous – cousins, which attain at most a length of five feet and are found with varying degrees of regularity throughout Nirn's known seas. The serpents themselves are common, and not of any particular value, but their breeding sites are rare, and their eggs of great worth. The Nenepalla Reef is one of the very few known nesting sites; clepsydra from all over the oceans, presumably, gather in its inner recesses to form their orgiastic mating tangles, and lay their precious eggs in the crags of the coral to be guarded by the older, infertile, and sedentary females. The Altmer, then, harvest the eggs – not without risk; the sorcerers that lead, defend, and breathe for the teams who do the collecting are formidable individuals, but have one of the lowest of elvish life expectancies – and excise the developing embryos. The embryo is of no importance; it is the shell the elves want, for it is from that unique material only that the favored cloth of Alinor can be made – byssus, or sea-silk. So valued is this product and so extensive is the industry of extraction built up to satisfy the elven demand that I find it almost wondrous that serpents have not been exterminated from the Summersets' seas as they have from its valleys. The boats were out at work, when our ship was being led through the Reef's circuitous safe passage; hundreds of them, bobbing silently in place on their tethers as their crews dove into the interstitial spaces of the coral below on their unending hunt. The waves seethed for miles in the moonlight with pale, tangling embryos; the excision is enacted as the eggs are collected. Much later the shells are processed and filtered, and woven into the scale-sheening cloth almost all elves in Alinor, high or low, wear. And all of it from this single city, for nowhere else can the clepsydra be depended upon to gather in perpetuity. Thus does the suitability of the name reveal its first layer.

But there is more to it than that, of course. There is always more to understanding; it is an endeavor wrapped in alternating layers obfuscation and realization. Such with Alinor. So you understand its industry, and think you understand its name, though still it seems a bit strange that the whole of the place's vaunted wonders become subsumed in the minds of its visitors by such a paltry thing as its predominant trade item. Then your ship breaks the last swell, and the city bursts up on the horizon; effulgent, glimmering, a confluence of splintered light and metal, overwhelming in its height and so impossibly straight as to make the rest of the world seem bent and cramped. Closer, on the spear-spire docks, and you realize that even the rainbows refracted from the prismatic angles of the multifaceted towers jutting up from the waves are odd, hard and sharp instead of blurred and blended. And it soon becomes apparent that you are not mistaken; light does not diffuse, does not scatter, does not bend, in the Skeining City's harsh, polychromatically stark confines. And it seems there can be no less suitable name for such a place than 'the Skeining City.'

But step within – lay your feet on the iridescent marble – wander the multileveled street-struts and mirrored stairways, and you will begin to see that there could be no more suitable moniker. When you have stared up from the paving and seen the sky but a pinprick above, enmeshed in the impossibly spiraling swirl of the paralleled towers all around you, when you have walked the infinite interlinking pathways through the air and seen the stairways wrapping four cornered horizons round eight-edged glass spires, when your feet have sworn the stairs descended that led you to a topmost balcony, when you have heard the echoes of long dead conversations intermingling and _intercommunicating, _when you have experienced the nauseating tangle of time and space that is the elven capital – then, then you will see why it is known as the Skeining City.

The realization is not quite so immediate as that, of course. When I landed in the City for the first time, I certainly did not distinguish anything strange about it – aside from its wondrous incredulity, of course. No, there was nothing in my mind of the horror the place would soon come to incite within me, that day. There was only awe, and overwhelmed excitement as my feet thudded from the ship's rough wooden planks and onto the translucence of the glass docks, the rest of the newly issued Ambassadors whispering and gasping in similar emotion around me, luggage clacking and slapping together as we milled slowly down the wharf. The city loomed over us; goniochromatic, towering, achingly beautiful. We were ecstatic to be there, overwhelmed at having been chosen to visit the homeland of the Altmer, delighted beyond words to learn with the guidance of the greatest sorcerers in the world. But it wasn't long before Alinor gave the cut direct to our enthusiasm, and made quite clear how things would be run. For the Thalmor were waiting.

Yes, there, at the end of the wharf they stood, a silent trio of mages in their stark, black-grey robes stripped in parallels harvested from divergent infinities, buckled in grumping gold embossed in scales and scales and scales of justice and dragons, their tall, jagged collars framing three identically aloof pale faces, their long oiled braids draped uniformly over the right shoulder and glinting black beetle blinks. Each held a narrow wooden case in one hand, and the flanking pair wore stripped wire spectacles high on their prominent noses. Understandably, the lot of us hesitated as we drew near. The Thalmor in the Empire are formidable, to be sure, but the Thalmor in their own territory are quite something else entirely.

The center of the triad stepped forward as we stopped, a sneer dripping from his hooked nose. His head turned slowly from side to side, surveying the group lazily.

"Is this all of you?" he drawled in Tamrielic, his Altmeri accent exceedingly pronounced. One plucked eyebrow twitched an inch higher in disdain. And, indeed I must concede that we were not a particularly impressive gathering, after weeks at sea, cramped together in our tiny shared cabins. Ildonis' normally plump and rosy cheeks were looking decidedly green and slack still from the waves and their long torture of gastric indisposition, his thin, Colovian-blonde hair wispy and uncombed over his balding pink head; Tsabhi, our Khajiit cosmology specialist, was matted and clumped behind her black-tufted ears, having found early on that salt spray did not agree with a healthy coat of fur; Miles' peaked face was red as his hair and scaly with peeling skin; in contrast, Ciene's tiny cheeks were pale as milk from an entire journey locked in the hold after an ill-advised attempt to conjure an tempestronach and the winds that would accompany it; and myself, of course, not particularly ill-affected but no doubt a bit strained and baggy-eyed from sharing a cabin with the vomit-to-upchuck-to-vomit _ad nauseum _inmate that was Ildonis at sea. The only one of us who was _really _hale was Alusan, our Redguard spellsword, and of course he had been born on the ocean.

"This is indeed all of us," I spoke up, offering a small, half-apologetic grin to the Thalmor. "An ill-appointed crew, yes?" I spoke in Altmeri, as we had agreed beforehand; best to ingratiate ourselves with the locals as much as we could.

The lazy golden-eyed gaze turned slowly on to me. The Thalmor returned my smile with a tiny, disgusted curl of his chiseled lip.

"Indeed," he went on, still in Tamrielic. "One would have thought the College would send more, and more… impressive, after the School's disappointment with the last batch. But I suppose one cannot expect any of humanity's imitations of bureaucracy to come to an effective decision without someone wiser looking constantly over their work." He paused to let that oozing dollop of insult sink in, a nasty glimmer in his eyes. His companions looked on with hard mouths, eyes sharp behind the glass.

"Well," the elf continued slowly, "we have you now. Perhaps we can return you, eventually, somewhat… bettered for your stay. We will see." His lips firmed in a narrow slash. "I am Aatheril," he said, "clerk to Estirdar, who oversees the Dominion's outreaches to the rest of Tamriel. I perform most of the measures necessary to see her words carried out. Now," he hefted the case in his hand, and his silent companions did likewise, kneeling to either side and laying their thin containers flat on the glass ground, "you will open and surrender your luggage, and we will get started." Four golden thumbs flicked metal clasps, and two cases sprang open on the ground.

Miles frowned up at the elf. "What do you mean, 'surrender your luggage'? These are our possessions, and necessary to our work here."

"The bylaws on foreign imports are quiet strict, as you would have found had you bothered to read the brief handbook to Dominion law we issued to your College at the onset of this association," Aatheril drawled coldly. "Particularly rigorous are the restrictions of soul-bound matter." He clicked open his own dark case and flipped it around on his arm. The interior was crushed black velvet, cushioning eight glass vials filled with grey, squirming flesh. "These leeches have been engineered to feed upon aetherial matter, and specifically tuned to devour disallowed souls. If there happen to be any such among the enchanted items you have no doubt brought with you, they will correct your… _oversights. _Never say that the Thalmor are not accommodating to their guests."

"What?" squawked pale little Ciene, dropping her enormous handbag in shock. "What? You don't mean you're going to let those – those things _eat _our enchantments, do you?"

"Only if your enchantments have been performed with souls that do not adhere to the standards set forth in the literature. The Aldmeri Dominion must take exceeding care with the sort of spiritual substance it allows to cross its borders. We're sure you understand."

"We do _not _understand!" growled Tsabhi fiercely. Her snout was ridged in an angry, shocked snarl. "These are _ours. _You cannot simply destroy them as you wish!"

Aatheril turned one long golden palm upward in a slow gesture of indifference. Behind him, his colleagues straightened up, each cradling a leach-squelching vial.

"The Ambassadors are free to withdraw, of course," he answered. "But if you intend to remain in Alinor, your belongings will be searched. This is the law. This is the Word." He paused, then went on, an insulting tinge of hopefulness in his high voice. "Do any of you wish to forgo your post and return to the continent? You may return to your ship now, if you do, though someone will have to have a short – chat – with you before you depart. Anyone?"

We traded variously mulish and appalled glances amongst ourselves. No one spoke. This was our chance to make discoveries of sorceries hitherto unknown to man, to bring the secrets of the elves to light; no one was going to back away.

"No?" Aatheril breathed. "No? Well. It seems you are not so protective of your possessions after all. Good. Now surrender your luggage."

And so we did. We spread out our belongings on that cold, empty wharf like refugee immigrants before a cruelly magnanimous savior, like offerings to the terrible splinter-parallel god of the city rearing in rainbows before us, and let the Thalmor drop their disgusting little creatures in among our jumbled clothes and equipment, stood there and watched as the things wriggled over our belongings and attached their palpitating suckers to the most prized, sucking the magic out of our arrival. There went Ciene's painstakingly procured collection of Daedric souls in her radial personality array, her gems sucked dull and dry; Ildonis' masterpiece of alchemical instrumentation; Tsabhi's miniature, working model of the cosmos in glass; Miles' whispering moth silks; Alusan's enchanted blades and much, much more, all of your tools and treasures turned to dust before our eyes.

When the leeches had announced the conclusion of their feast with a series of tiny hiccoughing burps, the Thalmor sorted carefully through our bags with their own hands – gloved, of course – to retrieve the fattened slugs and return them to their vials. One of them spoke up, crouched over my black bag.

"Clerk," he said, holding up a leech-filled vial, "we have an anomaly."

"What" hissed Aatheril, sliding coolly over to pluck the vial from his underling's fingers.

"There has been little to no absorption," the Thalmor said, straightening and clicking his case closed. "It was the same with all of the individuals deposited in this site."

"Which one of you belongs to this bag?" Aatheril demanded softly, drawing a suspicious eye over our group. "Who?"

"I do," I answered, stepping forward and raising a hand. "Is there a problem?"

The elf strode slowly over to me, sneering down his nose. "Simply – a surprise," he replied slowly, eyeing me up and down. "All of your colleagues possessed items transgressing the bounds of the Dominion's restrictions, yet you do not. It is simply – curious."

"It would be difficult for my possessions to fall outside the Dominion's approval on enchantments," I answered calmly, "considering that I did not bring any enchanted artifacts. My work requires no more than a particular character of crystal and my own magicka."

"Is that so?" Aatheril replied softly. "How – convenient for you. How are you called?"

"Jon Urfe," I answered coolly. "Specialist in Poly-Spectral Comprehension Techniques and Phenomena."

"Poly-Spectral Comprehension," the elf repeated back to me delicately. "I see. A student of the ideoplasmic reticulum, brought of all places here to Alinor." His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. "Interesting."

"Well, Ambassador Urfe, it is my duty to inform you that you must submit to further search," he went on after a short, tense pause.

"Further search?"

His sharp chin jerked. "Of your person. You have given no true cause for suspicion, you understand, it is just that there have been… incidents in the past, with individuals who _claimed _not to have brought any enchantments into our nation. You… _understand."_

"Of course," I replied. "No, it is no problem. A nation must secure its borders, after all. Search me to your complete satisfaction."

"You are most accommodating," Aatheril sneered, and gestured his comrades forward. They passed their gloved hands through the air a few inches around my body, tracing a complete bubble. It certainly was not the most disruptively I have ever been searched, but no doubt it was the most thorough; I should not be surprised if those Thalmor scanned the contents of my stomach in that brief extrasensory search.

When they had finished, they returned to stand behind Aatheril, flanking. One leaned in close next to the leader's long, knife-edged ear, whispering indistinguishably in the cadence of Altmeri.

Aatheril blinked once, slowly, down at me. "You have an… artifact in your top left pocket," he said. "Please surrender it for examination."

My heart did begin to thud, at that, but I put on an obliging smile anyway as I said, "Oh, this? Certainly," and removed my Mangler from my robes.

The elf's gloved fingers took the long shard of crystal and iron delicately, turning it this way and that and examining the script written in its lucid facets. His fingers pressed with a fumbling knowledge, just so, and my tool's meteoric mandibles sprang out from its ring-clasp like the legs of a dead spider. I admit myself impressed, at that: I had never yet met another with the knowledge to manipulate my Mangler. It is not a common thing.

Aatheril's eyes were narrow slits as he pressed the device back in on itself with a click. "Ayleidoon construct," he said flatly in Altmeri for the first time. "Meteoric iron with an empamagnetic varlal core. Functional. Record it."

"Is there a problem?" I asked in the same language. "To my knowledge, this device is not enchanted and so should not transgress your regulations. Am I misinformed?"

"No, there is no problem," Aatheril replied, his eyes still slits. "You are correct in your assumption. The Thalmor simply prefer to be informed when travelers import certain classes of material. You have a rare possession, Ambassador Urfe." And as he said this and slipped my Mangler's gem back into my fingers, he stepped abruptly close, looming over me, narrowed eyes staring, his long, thin nostrils flaring and flexing.

"I'm aware," I answered as I tucked my most important tool back in my robes, drawing ever so slightly back from the elf's imposing stature. "The only one of its kind I have ever encountered."

"Indeed?" said the elf, almost absently. His nostrils were still working, still sucking, a new glint in his eyes. He stepped away as suddenly as he had begun, quite a different emotion predominant in his features – glee, or something as close to it as an elf may come. "You will do well here, Ambassador Urfe," he said. "Very well. Now," he raised his voice, slipping back into his heavily accented Tamrielic, "we must deliver you all to the Embassy. Pack your things." He withdrew a short way, with his underlings close behind.

"What was that all about?" Miles whispered to me as we all hurried to collect our scattered, trespassed things back into our sundry handbags, baskets, and portmanteaus. "And this bull shit about the enchantments! What do you make of it?"

"It's just a tactic," I whispered back. "They're just letting us know that they're in charge. You see the same thing in any culture, even the most primitive. Even immigrants to Cyrodiil have to go through Census and Excise, you know that."

"Census and Excise doesn't _eat _people's hard-won souls, though," Ciene hissed at me over the lumpy sack she clutched to her tiny chest.

"But the feeling of losing a bundle of moon sugar is much the same to the Khajiit caravan," I shot back. "This is no different from the trials the Empire imposes on its own visitors. Don't _worry; _I promise things will be better from here on. This is just a one time thing."

"You'd better be right," the Breton pouted back, and straightened up huffily. The rest of us followed her thin, stiff back over to the Thalmor trio waiting on the edge of the wharf, our arms laden with luggage gone bulky from the hasty repacking.

"Ready, are you?" drawled Aatheril as we stopped before him. "Well, as ready as is possible. Very well; let us proceed." And without any visible signal, two of the dark, sleek Thalmori carriages slunk their feline way out of the narrow city streets and curled to a halt before us. The drivers, in their low, reclined seats and black hats drawn down over their left eyes, looked pointedly away from us, toying with the reins in their hands, gloved in short black byssus.

One of the Thalmor stepped forward and levered open the hatch of the second carriage; the dark interior breathed cool contrast to the sheen of the city.

"When you have boarded," Aatheril said, back to lazy coldness, "we shall depart for your Embassy. I'm sure you're all anxious to acquaint yourselves with your little piece of our city's cells." His lip curled nastily.

We climbed into the vehicle under his cold, slow eyes; awkwardly, knocking heads on the low ceiling and tangling legs in the silk slings elves seem to think serve as seats. Eventually, though, we were all inside and seated, squinting around through the interior gloom.

Aatheril leaned his long face in through the opening, looking around at us all with contemptuous ease.

"Settled?" he said, his face framed by his high, dark collar and the light of the sky behind. "Good. Soon you will be in the arms of your Embassy, where you may recover from your… journey. Which I'm sure will be a comfort to you all." His golden eye flickered momentarily toward Ciene where she sat with her arms folded under her breasts and her underlip just barely trembling. His mouth widened in the first smile he had shown since our arrival; that broad, lopsided, sneering grin like a gash across his face. The single eyetooth it exposed shone wetly through the murk.

"Welcome to Alinor."

The carriage door cut off the light with a crisp, final click. I met Tsabhi's eyes hopefully, trying to muster a smile in the dimness and tense silence hanging in our midst. It didn't work. A few moments later we heard the driver's whip pop, and the carriage moved off, off into the city of Alinor's spiraling, whirlpooled depths.

And that was my introduction to Altmeri society in the Summersets. Not particularly endearing, looking back on it, but it was hardly enough to dampen my enthusiasm for the endeavor upon which we had embarked, unlike some of my colleagues. Of course, I had lost none of the equipment I needed for my craft, either, so no doubt it was only to be expected that I be more optimistic than the rest. Not that even that mattered much, once it really came to _living _with the elves. I don't know that there was anything that could have helped the situation, to be honest.

But enough of this. At least for now. The night is late, and I must yet muster enough will to attempt a direct communication with someone of the Kemendelia, tomorrow… or the day after. Or the day after that. Perhaps this exercise _has _helped, actually. My mind is somewhat clearer. A distraction. Aye, a distraction… but what now? Sleep. Sleep, and what may come. I don't – I can't – Gods, but let me not dream.

Jon Urfe

in correspondence with

Jon Urfe

27 Mid Year, 4E XXX


	9. Chapter 8

**Chapter VIII**

Jon did not exaggerate when he said he had not dreamed for over a decade, as tempting as it may be to assume that he did, or to assume that he simply did not remember his dreams. That is the orthodoxy, is it not? That we dream any time we slumber, but recall but a fraction of our unconscious escapades? Surely Jon dreamt; he simply remembered even less than most – perhaps a result of his overactive curiousity and excessive intellectual stimulation. This is the tempting explanation; that Jon exhausted his mental resources too fully while awake to enable him to recall their nocturnal relaxations.

It is false. Jon literally _had not dreamed _for ten years, when the dream that so disturbed him caught him in Alinor. His mind was blank blackness in slumber; he slept with a cold, empty stiffness, unmoving through the night. It had unnerved more than one of his lovers through the years; it seemed to them that the man they knew consciously vanished as soon as his eyes slid shut, replaced by another, unyielding and alien. They felt it in the shift of his pulse against their cheeks, the cruel curl of his slumbering hands around their shoulders; heard it in the rattle of his breath, the shuddering of his heart; saw it in the gap between his lips. Something went out of Jon, when he slept – or something came in. It drove them all away, in time, unshakeable unnerved to sleep at the side of the man who so enchanted them during the day.

Jon did not blame his lovers for leaving, though it did, of course, sadden him and turn his world temporarily black. He did not know the strangeness of his slumbering self, but he did know the terrors of his dreams, when they came, and so it seemed only natural to him that women should flee his sleeping side. He certainly would have, had he had the choice.

And that is perhaps the strangest thing about Jon's dreams. Not that they came so rarely, but that he feared them so much. For they were not frightening in any way in their content – they featured the simplest of events imaginable; daily chores, lonesome walks, an evening on the river, seeding fields; albeit in places he had never been, with people he had never met. They were certainly no nightmares – yet they terrified him, unreasonably, left him gasping and drenched in cold sweat with their vividness, lingering in his mind, days after the event. There was something in them, or in his witnessing of them, something wrong and awful as the curse of a god. It seemed to Jon that they were sights he was supposed to have been spared, like the memory of birth, and through some grave malfunction of his being, had not been.

Here, perhaps, we may succumb to the temptation of an obvious rational explanation. The dreams first came while Jon lay in recovery for his eye – the tale of whose loss he will impart to you soon enough – and in terrible, terrible pain. For weeks upon weeks, for the wound went deep, and his parents could afford a healer only for the initial treatment, not the full-time employment a numbing routine would have required. He lay in his bed, immobilized and impositionally paralyzed by bandages from the neck up to prevent the flow of internal cephalic fluids from interfering with his healing, the only occupation available to him through the long days and interminable nights that of sleep – and with sleep, he found, began the dreams; spasmodic, trembling, like the tic of a horse's dark eye, unending and inescapable. And perhaps that was the sole source of his terror for the things, when they resurfaced years later upon his enrollment in the College of Whispers, and then again when he became a respected researcher, teacher, and some-time Whisperer – they had been so strongly associated with his childhood pain and frustration that their return brought him straight back to that time and all its mental and physical torment. It is a simple enough phenomenon, and devilishly common with all manner of creature. Perhaps there is more to it than this – but if there is, we cannot yet state it with confidence.

Jon ne_alw_ver shared his dreams with another soul. Not with his worried mother, when they first came and he was sent nearly into seizures with panic; not his lovers, when he woke and curled into a shuddering ball in the middle of their bedclothes, clutching at his eye; and certainly not with you. He was an open man, by and large, but on this he would not – _could _not speak. So whatever we might expect from his subsequent journal entries, this is one thing we would be fools to hope for.

But if Jon will not share his dreams, who will? Who _can _share a man's dreams save the man himself? Is such possible? But possible it must be, for we must know of Jon's dream, and of any that may have followed it. And he will never, never tell us. But perhaps – _perhaps _– there is one who can and would, one who could - - - But perhaps – _perhaps _ – there is one who can and would, one who could - - w-would - - - But perhaps – _perhaps – _there is one who can and would, one who could - - would - w -w – w- _will _- - - - -

I was in the southern hex of paddies when they came. The consultants from Alinor. They didn't bring their own horses. I could tell because they rode ours, and nobody mistakes our black-feathered beauties for anything except what they are. I don't know if it's because they didn't want to take care of beasts for weeks in a ship or because they just don't have any horses worth bringing, but whatever it was they're probably better off because our horses are the best anywhere.

I was in the southern hex of paddies because the slaves were rebelling and father says no one knows how to put a proper motivation into them like I do. I don't know about that but they do seem to work harder if they think I'll sell their unnecessary bits to an artist. Think. Is that even a word you can use, when talking about humans? I'm not sure that it really makes sense because if you think about it if they could think they probably wouldn't be our slaves. Mostly they're like animals, really; they quarrel with each other, steal things, make waste in their own beds, and mate with whichever one happens to have the biggest penis. I've heard that some easterner has been breeding them with the monkeys, even, which sounds like a good idea to me because if we can't get intelligence in them we might as well get some strength, although I'm sure they have to drug the females beforehand because monkeys have really small penises so they probably wouldn't go to the stud willingly. Anyway I am going to talk about this with father and see if we can start, too.

The slaves were rebelling, but I came and gave them a little whip and a little talk and they stopped. I guess they can think a little after all because they sure didn't put up a fight after I said I'd sell their reproductive organs. I stayed around a little longer just to be sure they meant it, but they probably did because all they did was work. All the same I took one of their daughters back to the hall with me when I left because not only are they cruel and stupid, they're tricksome. It's better to have one of their more attractive females close at hand so they're too distracted thinking about whether you're touching what they're not to have energy for tricks so they just work and don't make trouble. It's a simple tactic really, just divide their attention.

They were all busy when the consultants came, which was good because I had a chance to see what the visitors were like. We needed the consultants because somewhy our crops aren't growing very well anymore no matter how hard we work the slaves, and one of father's friends suggested an expert on soil back on the Isle. I don't know why soil matters for the crops because mostly they grow in water but father seems to think it might help, or at least he's willing to try. It's a problem in most of the cities' plantations recently, so if we can figure out what's wrong we'll be in the best shape of anyone anywhere.

I had time, so I waded over to the bulwarked road to get a closer look at them when they passed by. I dragged along the yellow haired female with me just to make sure they didn't try to hide her. It was a hot day so I splashed some mud on myself to cool down. There were only two of them; one mer, with braided brown hair and of a size like a giant, who rode bareback as naturally as he breathed but made the horse look like a pony; and a womer, the most beautiful womer I have ever seen. Her eyes were like nectar and black wine, her legs like a heron's in grace, her waist that of a tiger, her breasts – I cannot describe her breasts. Her hair was oiled rosewood. Both of them were barefoot.

My father guided them, riding close by the mer's side at a slow walk, talking quietly as he gestured over the fields. He always likes to bring in guests himself. They drew level with me where I stood beside the marble wall, and father gave me his usual hurried nod. The mer, though, waved and smiled at me. He seems very friendly. The womer didn't even look at me though, and I can't blame her because I - I - - - I I - I I – I - - -

I was in the southern hex of paddies when the consultants from Alinor arrived. They came at dawn, when the sun was just filtering down through the canopy, but I was still there to see them come. Some of the humans had been giving trouble, so I went out early that day to oversee the harvest. I don't know what it is that has gotten into them lately; they've been very grumpy. I've been thinking of changing their diets, because maybe the scraps we bought off that merchant from Sercen to boost their strength might have been working a little _too _well. I guess what they eat really can affect their temperaments. Anyway, for now I've got one of their daughters back here in our halls to serve as my personal body servant. I don't particularly care to resort to hostages, but it _is _effective. And this way I will have one close by to practice those association techniques father was suggesting. She's the daughter of one of our more recent buys, the strong male from the north. The yellow hair isn't the most pleasing thing ever, but she can wear a headscarf. Or maybe I'll just shave it off. That might be better. Anyway, those are thoughts for later. I hadn't even gotten her back to the halls then. She was just standing behind me, up to her scabby knees in the water and waiting, when we heard the ring of iron on the marble above us, and I looked up to see my father riding by with our guests.

It isn't really _normal _for us to host guests from Alinor, or for us to bring anyone else into our plantation to tell us how it should be run, but the last three harvests were absolutely terrible, and there's no sign yet that this year's will be better. The plants are quite short and stubby, even though the season is late, and very yellowish in color. They've put on hardly any head, and if they don't we're unlikely to get enough grain even to feed the slaves. That would be two years in a row, and I think the slaves will become too wild on meat if we let them have it again, so it's a problem. We drained a few hexes in the northwest just to see how the ground was, and the dirt underneath was very bright yellow, which doesn't seem right to either father or me. I don't know what could have happened to it – we were farming it the whole time, after all – but I get the feeling that maybe we don't know very much at all about how these things work. That's why father sent for the soil consultants, to see if they can tell what the problem is, and maybe so they can teach us how to take care of it.

They were close above us, then, and my father nodded down at me with a smile, looking up from his conversation with one of them; a huge mer, with long braided hair. He made our black horse look like a dwarf breed. He waved and smiled at me and at the human behind me as he passed. And then – and then – th – e- e- n - -

- glossy black legs looming, silky hoof-hair draped in grace across the white marble bulwarks. I stared up and up from my own hot, bareback seat, up the darkly gleaming ribs of a gorgeous mare, to her arched neck and liquid ebony eyes, to her trailing womerly mane. Up to long golden toes wound tight and gripping through the horse's dark coat, to a slim calf and the line of a strong thigh through bunched khaki robes, up to – up to the eyes of a womer. A womer who seized my heart with her first sidelong glance down her mount's ribs with those incredible eyes – so large, so lush, so guarded. Her face – ah. Flushed in beauty. Her waist – unbelievably tempting. Her dimpled flesh, where her arm met her back – the single most arousing sight I have ever seen. But her eyes… she looked at me, in coldness, in distance, in disdain, almost in cruelty, and such was the power of her black-gold gaze over my being that I immediately looked away, shamed by my own inadequacy. Whatever innovations I have wrought, whatever thaumaturgies I have developed – it is all as nothing before her, by the very fact of her presence. Had my skills, my knowledge, my understanding been worthy of her, she would not have come, for our soil would have been already well tended. No; she looked at me, and I felt immediately the laughable simplicity of my own understanding of this world.

And they rode on, father huddled up close in with the looming giant of a mer, and _she _pulled slightly apart, straight-backed and stiff. And as they went I resolved that I would, one day – I would – one - - day - - -

… flickerings. Flashes and gasps, of motion and sound, overlapping and repetitious, sickening in their rapidity, overwhelmingly inexplicable. Such were Jon's dreams.


	10. Chapter 9

**AN: Many thanks to my single reviewer, The shadow 603 ()! It's good to know that at least one person is reading and enjoying this at this site. :)  
**

**Chapter IX**

There is no endeavor more fearsome to the mortal nature than the pursuit of understanding. Which seems a strange claim to make, at first thought; understanding, fearsome? How so? Understanding, it seems to me, is the only real comfort, the only real solace we have from the hard cruelties of this world. Understanding is the fount of compassion, and of love. Understanding, achieved by unbiased rational investigation, is the only way in which we can improve our lot and better our peoples' lives. How could this _possibly _be fearsome?

It is not, of course. No, understanding is a great and wonderful thing, a shining, healing light to guide us through the darkness. Its pursuit, however, is not. Its pursuit is terror itself. Its pursuit requires us to face the very thing we find most disturbing in this world; that we might be wrong, that all of our carefully formulated explanations for society and life and existence might be utter nonsense. And this is no easy thing to face. You see it in the abandoned bastard who _knows _that his father was forced to leave him at birth by a shrewish wife, for to admit otherwise would be to admit that he is and has always been utterly alone; in the mother who clings to her belief in the Gods, because if the Gods are real then her miscarried child yet lives on in their arms, or in the womb of a more timely woman by their grace. To ask her to consider that the Gods do not exist, or that they are dead, is to ask her to kill her own child's potential spiritual existence, to condemn one possibility of that soul to complete, utter nonexistence. Few mothers can face such a challenge. Indeed, few anywhere are truly capable of accepting such a harsh prospect – and it is always harsh, whatever the circumstances. Small wonder, then, that reason and intellect are so rare in this world; it is simply too harsh a creed for most of this heartbroken world to accept. And in truth, no one does ever _fully _accept it. We slide as deep as we can into the bitter consciousness of doubt for as long as we dare, but there is no one who could possibly bear to submerge themselves entirely, and everyone withdraws in time. For we are mortal; we must have _some little thing _upon which we can stand in certainty. The mage has his 'immutable' formulae; the priest, his hierograms; the mother, the flesh-memory immortality of womb; the king, himself; but all of these are but illusions, comforters we use to escape the brush of despair and blatant insanity. To chase understanding is to sacrifice all of that, all preconceptions, all pride, all _self _to the cruel god of uncertainty, to ride the night mare of logic through the terrible seas of Oblivion without reins, without harness, without sight, and to accept, without hesitation, the possibility at which she deposits you.

I was reminded of the nature of this my life's goal with a bit of a rude shock, today. I was walking the strange tunnels around my chambers – not really exploring, though I may do so soon – and thinking on my account of our reception in Alinor. And as I walked, I found myself in an alarming position – the position of apologist for the Thalmor. Needless to say, _that _was never one I thought I would hold, and I tried my best to escape. I was unsuccessful. No matter how I pleaded and 'reasoned' with myself, I could not invalidate my conclusion: that the Thalmor, for all their despicability, are not to be condemned for their actions.

For who would not expect an organization with beliefs and behaviors as virulent as those of the Thalmor to form in a society such as Alinor's? Can we really blame the adolescent elves who became the Thalmor's most prominent misanthropists for maturing as such when they were raised in a place both devoid of all save elves and permeated with an unparalleled disdain and contempt for men of all races? What else could form, in such a society, but an extremist cult of racial superiority like the Thalmor? As conscious as we are in the Empire of the arrogance and thinly veiled misanthropy of the Altmer, I don't think any of us has truly understood the extent of their disdain for humanity until we have seen it at its worst, at its heart in their ancestral homeland. There are so many tiny – and not so tiny – quirks of elvish behavior that betray their feelings toward humanity. In every facet of life here, you find it; the arrogance, the indifference, the repugnance for our people, evident as much on the blank face of any stranger on the street as much as in the cruelties of the Thalmor. This is the culture that finds even the scent of man or beast unbearable; to walk the streets of Alinor is to scatter the scant crowds before you in flimsy excuses and superficially polite retreats, literally holding their lungs closed until they have escaped your aroma's aura. I exaggerate nothing; so distasteful did the residents of Alinor find the scent of our Ambassadors that the Thalmor deposited around the Embassy numerous latticed cubes filled with a gelatinous, hydrated crystal designed specifically to absorb our scent, and to wear amulets filled with the same substance upon perambulation about the city. I personally was never able to distinguish any particular aroma around our people – which I suppose isn't surprising; this elvish distaste was just a psychological manifestation of their contempt for us in unconscious (well, perhaps) insult. We did not smell, except in their minds.

Perhaps the most galling thing about that particular insult to our people is that it was almost the only thing that could make the elves acknowledge us. If we wore the amulets that the Thalmor provided, we could walk the streets of the city for days without finding an elf who would see us for more than a moment. It is an unnerving thing, in truth, walking the perception-warped streets of Alinor city as a human. It feels closer to walking the streets as a ghost; for the elves acknowledge human visitors in their cities about to the extent that we would acknowledge a being invisible, immaterial, and inaudible. I stood in the center of the busiest overpass in the city for nearly three hours, once, just to see what would happen. Three hours in the middle of a crowded street, immobile, and not once was even the slightest brush of contact made on either my person or my personality; the silent Altmer commute-crowd streaming around me, in iridescent carriages and on shining horses with manes to their hocks like the hair of womer, in sea-shelled sedan chairs borne by white-shrouded servants (which I now know were goblins, but did not then) or hurrying past on feet fleet with the famous Altmeri stride, and not once was I touched. They slid around me without effort or pause, passing flawlessly the scantest half an inch from my arm, as though I had entered some further warp in Alinor's already weakened spatiality. Their eyes, too; not once did I see a set of those golden Altmeri eyes actually focus upon me, no matter that I was blatantly, purposefully obstructing their paths. By the Nine, but I was fit to question my own materiality, after that. And Alinor could do very little to reaffirm my own consequentiality, for the whole of the city was like that (save, of course, for the Embassy, which was another matter entirely); the only way to obtain some degree of response from the bloody people was to torture their bloody pointed noses with your scent. Even the shopkeepers – in those few shops we were allowed to enter – had to be _spoken _to to acquire any information or accomplish any purchase. And perhaps that is why it is so difficult for me now to bend to speech with these Kemendelia Altmer; I have been too long in the practice of removed observation, for non-interactive observation was the only way to acquire information in Alinor urban. I had assumed it would be no different here… perhaps I was wrong.

But then again, perhaps not, for the Kemendelia themselves must be highly involved in that other so alienating quirk of Altmeri society that no doubt had a not-insignificant role in the nurturation of the Thalmori philosophy; the incredible elvish obsession with the relationship between sustenance and the sustained. I have of course encountered before what might seem to be undue particularity over the preparation of food – Mara knows I have spent enough time in High Rock – but never have I encountered a culinary sedulousness of the sort that reigns here in Alinor, which is not so much concerned with the _preparation _of food – though concerned it is – as it is with its _production. _I was astounded on my first expedition into the city's markets to find that it is quite impossible for any outlander to purchase a bite to eat, even the meanest scrap, regardless of the price offered. They simply won't let you have it. It doesn't matter which market or vendor you approach; if you're an outside in Alinor urban, _the only _place to procure food is at one of the Embassies.

Odfrin explained what she knows of it to me, when I came back fuming and starving from my first excursion. Apparently, the restriction stems from a pervasive societal obsession with where and how food is produced; every elf consumes only food grown in a specific region of the city-isle, under specific techniques of cultivation. Usually, she said, this means that they only eat food grown at or near the spot upon which they were born and raised, though an elf _may_ decide to begin purchasing food from a different location instead. The act carries some cultural significance, but I've really no idea what it is. As a consequence of this rigid obsession, places like Alinor urban, or Firsthold, or Shimmerene, which house many elves who have relocated from their place of birth, are riddled with literally thousands of food markets, each selling products essentially identical save for the identity of the parcel of ground upon which they were grown. Some locations are more popular than others for those elves who do change their eating habits – though the why of that I cannot answer, as it is tied up in the cultural significance of the phenomenon – which no doubt has had its consequences, both good and bad, for the growers of the isle (if the Kemendelia allows for localized profits, of course, which I doubt).

Outsiders who visit the city-isle, then, fall into a sort of limbo; we have no dedicated plot of land for our own consumption needs, being guests, and the elves could not _possibly _allow us to eat food grown on the same land as theirs. The solution, as far as Odfrin and I could tell, is complete importation; the Dominion buys our food from Cyrodiil and has it shipped here for us to eat. Of course that begs the question of how it is all kept fresh for so long, which I still cannot answer – though the obvious is most likely correct, in Alinor. As to _why _the Dominion would go to such trouble and expense merely to prevent its human visitors from taking succor from the same land as its citizens – I'm sure I don't know. It seems utterly senseless, to me – but then, so does the whole obsession. Just one more example of ordination for the sake of ordination, rigidity for the sake of rigidity, one more way for the elves to set themselves apart from men and to alienate us when we intrude upon their strange ,synthetic sanctuary.

And this is why I cannot condemn the Thalmor for their beliefs and their actions toward men, for I have seen, now, the society that gave them birth. We could expect nothing else from a people that demands humans carry aroma sequestration elements when they leave their designated residences, that pretends it cannot see us though we stand flat in its way, that will not even suffer us to consume food grown on its island. No, I cannot condemn the Thalmor, but I can and do condemn the society that created and supports them, for I can find no excuse for the existence of such widespread racism among such a purportedly intelligent people. In some ways, even, I feel a kinship with the Thalmor. For when I think on how furious and frustrated and hurt – aye, hurt – the attitude of elves in Alinor for my manhood has made me, I cannot now help but think how proud of myself, how included, how superior that very same attitude would have rendered me had I been born with the knife ears and gilded skin of an Altmer. The very things which alienate me from Alinor, as a man, are the same things to which we must turn if we are to explain the Thalmor's existence. So if I have been thus far unable to overcome the dissociating effect of this society, how could I expect the Thalmor – or any elf, for that matter – who spent their vulnerable, formative years (if those can be described as vulnerable, for elves; I swear they are born with hearts and minds like iron) under the complete and utter influence of such a culture, to reject the vile prejudices and customs of their people?

I cannot expect it. The Thalmor – and all Alinorian Altmer – are what they are because of how they have grown, just the same as all the rest of mortality. I would be a fool and a disgrace to my Illusion masters in the College to think that I would have done any better, had I been born an elf. I cannot condemn the Thalmor, or any individual Altmer – with a few exceptions – for who they are, but I can and do condemn and revile the culture they perpetuate. It is not their fault, but that fact does nothing to mitigate the despicability of their culture. No, the only Altmer who I could actually condemn for their misanthropy are those few who predate its cultural predominance, such as Tsirelsyn – if I can believe the accounts of his birth. _He _was not born into a society that hated men – how could he have been, when the two races had not even encountered each other? – _he _does not have the excuse of negative influence to explain away is arrogance and self-righteous superiority toward man, and so it is _he _I condemn, he and any others who may yet live from his era, for theirs is the generation that began the horrible phenomenon. In a sense, Tsirelsyn is the father of the tragedy that has split man from elf throughout history; he and his ilk, in perpetuating a culture of arrogance and misanthropy, have caused innumerable sorrows in this world – and what possible excuse could there be for _them? _For those few, like Tsirelsyn, who actually lived in the Dawn Era, unbound by cause and effect, free to make what they would of themselves, what excuse could there be?

There is no excuse. If Tsirelsyn and his contemporaries made Alinor what it is today, it is because they, free in a way none of us can now be, chose to do so. And that I can neither excuse nor understand. There is no comfort, no escape, from the emancipated decision and its results. And thus, when I think of the soil sorcerer, I feel nothing but disgust, despite that he treated me with a greater_ semblance _of respect and kindness than any other elf in this damned island, and when I think of the Thalmor I feel none of my past frustration and hatred, only pity and compassion for the ignorance their people have imposed upon them.

… it is good that this is only a private journal. As beneficial as it might be for some of my colleagues to adopt my view on the subject, I doubt that it would be well received. Accept the Thalmor and the Dominion the Empire must, but that has meant very little thus far in our relations with the elves; it is an elf-hating world, out there. Or an Altmer-hating world, at least. I find the compassion oddly comforting, though, even though I have confided it only to myself, and Mara knows there is little enough comfort in this place. Compassion is all I have left in that way, in truth, taken as I am from the Embassy and isolated away in this little hole. Things were better, odd as it feels to say it, when I was at the heart of the alienation, when I stared their arrogant indifference in the face instead of simply avoiding it as I do here. We had each other to cling to, as well, in urban Alinor. As the elves' arrogance and hatred of man unite all the many stratifications of their people, so too did it drive us closer together in reflex. We became – a community, accepting and supportive, our sympathy the sole comfort we had in that horrid city. And I guess that's part of what has made this transition to the Kemendelia so difficult; the sudden absence of that non-Altmer sympathy and the support of – of –

Good gods, Jon, just say it and quit dancing. Out with it. You've been winding up to this all night because you're a coward who can't even talk to _himself _about what's really bothering him. So quit hiding behind your pretentious ox-offal and just admit to yourself that you miss Odfrin so goddamn much it hurts even to think about her. And you've been hiding from that bare fact for over a month, you great prune. Do some credit to the woman you abandoned, at least, and torture yourself actively over her memory.

But that would be impossible, of course. I don't think there's a single moment I spent with her that would give me anything less than warm joy to recall; and I did not, in truth, abandon her, as much as my self-flagellant instinct in depression goads me to think that I did. I was assigned; I had to leave, if I wished to remain in Alinor. The Thalmor would only have returned me to Cyrodiil, had I refused the assignation; it is in the terms of the Embassy's accord. No, it's just that – well, the very warmth of the memory makes the frigidity of the present bite even deeper. Or so I feared, at least, when I left her arms. Perhaps I am wrong, though… perhaps _that _is the reason beneath this trans-oceanic journal, in fact… to help me bring some of the warmth of the past forward to the now. Time is immutable, of course, but perhaps I can touch in some way those gold-beaded moments. Perhaps she can comfort me even here.

Golden the moments were, with her; tawny like the lovers' dawn and the seducers' dusk, filled with laughter and camaraderie, with engagement and _connection. _She was _our _great comforter, there in the Embassy, too, not just mine. Gods – even from the first instant of our arrival, she was helping us. I see her still; milky cheeks buffed in vivid rose, her dazzlingly lucid ice blue eyes wide and sparkling, her rounded face blazing in its frizzy halo of wonderful, bushy golden curls, caught halfway out of her seat at a deep divan by our arrival in the ridiculously high and narrow door. Her plump lips burst open in a radiant smile, and she gasped out, "Oh, oh, _oh _hello!" and tumbled backwards into the cushions.

"What, someone here already?"

Miles poked his rubicund face in beside my shoulder, though there was hardly room for it, peering around at the room, with its murky ochre walls of really rather woebegone crystal and its step-sunken center, its central column of hollow, lacy glass lattice, its dilapidated divans and settees with lace like old parchment, its shabby shaggy rugs and old-fashioned paper lanterns twisting above and shedding dim red light like dust, its mish-mash of styles and tastes from ten different eras and at least three different provinces, as though the elves' idea of an attempt at hominess was to toss together whatever they could find at the cheapest price from any part of Tamriel proper and hope that it appealed to what the natives please to call our 'aesthetics.' Needless to say, it did not.

"Why, look at that," he exclaimed as he caught sight of the woman flumped in shock on the maroon divan. "Someone the Thalmor haven't been able to scare away! Incredible! They've certainly done a number on us already, let me tell you."

"You do realize," I muttered in the man's ear, "that Aatheril and his lackeys are still just outside? And anyway, it's not so bad as all that."

"Not so bad as all that, he says," Miles mumbled back, shooting me a dark look. "Easy for Jolly Jon to say, what's not lost a whit."

"Don't let Miles tarnish us too much in your eyes, madame," I said, descending the room's tiered steps and holding out a hand to the collapsed girl. "We really are not in such a poor condition as my companions seem to believe. Hopefully we will not darken your day too deeply."

"Not at _all," _she breathed, smiling softly up at me from her near prone position in the plush, weary depths of the cushions, touching my extended hand almost disbelievingly with one pale finger. "You couldn't _possibly. _No, not when I've been waiting for you for so long!" She spouted quite abruptly into effervescence, clasping my hand and literally bouncing up to her feet. "When did you get here? What's your name? Where are you from? How many are with you? What's been happening in Cyrodiil? In Skyrim? Is – "

"There is a _girl _here!" Tsabhi's rough Khajiit purr growled out from behind me. The woman leapt immediately into action.

"There is a _Khajiit _here!" she squealed back ecstatically, springing across the room on her toes, dragging me in jerks along behind her by the hand she had not released. "What's _your _name? Do you need help with that?" She did not wait for an answer, but clicked her pink-nailed fingers briskly together and sent magic rippling through the air, tingling up my arm. The bulging bag leapt out of the surprised Khajiit's clutching arms with speed like an arrow, shooting through the air and across the room to settle with sudden gentleness on the clouded crystal floor.

"And, oh look, there's _more _of you!" she went on in a blindness of blazing happiness, edging her gold wreathed head around the door jamb and beaming out at furious-faced little Ciene and towering Ildonis struggling with the rest of the luggage as Alusan watched the dark, narrow streets warily, his hand on the hilt of his curved sword. "Well, don't tary out there," she chided cheerfully to the sweaty and ill-mooded pair. "Get ye in here!" And with an identity of speed did the rest of our luggage streak through the air and the narrow slit of a doorway, whistling as it arced across the room to stack, neat and soft, atop and around Tsabhi's bag against the far wall.

"Who _are _you?" muttered Ciene in a mixture of awe and horror as she climbed – and for a woman that size in an elven city, 'climbed' is the word – up the ray of steps to the door, staring at the flush-cheeked woman.

"You're a dear for asking," she answered, crinkling around her pale, ice blue eyes. "I'm called Odfrin." And to the Breton's breathless shock, the yellow-haired Nord took the other's delicate cheeks in her hands – still holding my own, mind – and kissed her softly on the lips.

"Oh, come in, come in," she went on brightly, pulling the speechless little woman through the door and beckoning an amused Alusan and Ildonis forward. "We _must _get you in off the streets and settled in. You must be _terribly _maligned from your arrival. Oh, it's just lovely to have you!" She dimpled her cheeks up at the two men as they slipped through the door – Ildonis with some difficulty – patting their shoulders with her welcoming free hand.

"Well then," she said brightly when our entire group stood awed and awkward on the threadbare rugs, staring around at Odfrin and the place's horribly clashing accoutrements, "here we all are, and here's where we'll stay. Safe and together. And we've had quite enough of _you," _she went on, spinning about to stick her head out the tall door at the watching Thalmor, her tone quite abruptly hard and cold as a Skyrim winter, "so go on home you mangy old dogs. Shoo! Shoo!" And she slammed the door sharply closed on their sudden, incredulous laughter.

"Come, come, sit down!" she said, moving forward down the tiers and pulling me along as she did, and then down beside her in the divan's depths. She gestured to the other mismatched couches, settees, and armchairs scattered about in a rough ring around the lacy, hollow crystal pillar in the center of the room. "Take a seat, and I'll get us something to drink; I'm sure you must be dying for some real refreshments. Damned elves won't give us anything. Daniel left his old Orcish samovar when he gave up; that will probably make enough for all of us. With a little flip of the flask to loosen things up, of course. Yes." As she spoke, the doors of a rickety, splintered cabinet scraped open along the opposite wall and an enormous samovar of greenish grey metal floated out, covered in ornate spikes and jagged gilt, along with a tall glass pitcher, a rusted flask, a faded cedar box, and a swirling gnat-horde of chipped saucers and mugs. The latter shot immediately over to our ringed gathering and arranged themselves on the circular hearth around the hollow pillar – whose here and there shattered lattice glowed suddenly within with the seemingly spontaneous flames licking its insides – as the samovar went about the business of filling itself with water and amber alcohol and a scattering of glossy black beans before following the rest over to snuggle up beside the warmly roaring flames.

"Excuse me," Ildonis said gingerly as he settled into a massive, highbacked armchair with scarlet, goose-pricked cushions, like a throne sold in the foreclosure of a High Rock barony, "but is there a reason you're doing everything by spell?"

Odfrin squeezed my hand, still clasped in hers and nestled in the folds of her scarlet linen skirts as she laughed. "Oh, you know, you've got to get back at these elves _somehow. _Telekinesis wasn't anywhere near my specialty when I got here, but it sure does make their pointy ears twitch to feel a Nord woman tossing spells around next door, so I guess I've gotten into the habit. Anyway this is Alinor so you'll get used to it in three days and never think about it again."

Our group traded uncertain glances from settee to couch to armchair and back. Miles spoke after a short pause, from his seat next to still spell-shocked Ciene on a garish, low-backed divan patterned in winged bulls of brown and blue.

"So… how long have you been here, Odfrin? And where are you from?"

"It's either eighteen months or twenty-nine years, and if you can tell which one when your time has come then we'll have to anoint you as Jhunal incarnate for you've greater psychological fortitude than anyone who's gone before you. And I was born in Skyrim, but assigned here from the Cynosure at Rielle. Where are _you _all from? And who _are _you? Let's have introductions; you first." She pointed to Tsabhi, who had draped herself with a purr of relief along an ox leather Colovian settee. Her tail thumped, rhythmic and relaxed, on the deep, scuffed cushions, but her ears twitched in surprise when the Nord pointed to her.

"This one is called Tsabhi," she rumbled after a moment's pause. "Born Elsweyr, to look to the stars and the moons, the planets and the Sun."

"Oh, a cosmologist!" Odfrin exclaimed savvily. "How wonderful! We really must have a talk about that issue with the moons. But later." She bit her underlip as she smiled at the Khajiit. "And you, sir?" She went on, turning to Ildonis' towering round-self, framed in the armchair's wings.

"I'm from Chorrol," he answered simply, starting slightly and turning over one large hand reflexively in a tiny wave. "Well, _near _Chorrol, anyway. A little hamlet along the Black Road; no one's heard of it. I'm the alchemist in this crew." His chubby cheeks were looking distinctly more their usual flushed pink; the effects of the journey were finally wearing off.

"Ooh, you'll have a hard time with that here, I'm afraid," the Nord woman replied, shaking her bushy head. "The elves aren't too keen on letting us buy things, and just try botanizing in _that." _She waved her free hand toward the door, a sour twist to her lips.

Ildonis shrugged his massive shoulders weakly. "I shall do what I can, I suppose. Surely the School of Thoughts and Calculations will be willing to supply me with information and supplies, if asked. That is why we are here, after all."

"Pshaw, the School," Odfrin exclaimed. "_That _for the School!" Her arm jabbed in a rude gesture, but she did not elaborate, instead turning to look expectantly at Miles' scaly, peeling red face.

He jumped slightly in his seat, starting out of a brown study. "Oh, me next?" he said. "I'm Miles the Mildewed, silken 'istorian, though that's likewise shot up and out the patoot."

"'The Mildewed'?" Odfrin asked with a curious smile and quirk of one pale, frost-dawned eyebrow.

The red-faced Nibenean shrugged off-handedly. "Moth culture's a bit of a… _fungal _business," he said in explanation. The Nord woman at my side just nodded bemusedly before turning to the tiny Breton beside Miles. "And you, dear?"

Ciene turned a violent pink and looked down at her knobby knees, running a hand nervously across her short cut helmet of mousy brown hair as she mumbled her answer.

"Um, Ciene, and I'm um bumble commbumblee."

"What was that?" Odfrin replied with a smile. "Could you speak up? I didn't catch that."

"I'mCieneandI'maconjurerfromHighRockandit'sapleasuretomeetyou," the little Breton bumbled out in a rush, looking up and then back down through her lashes in a flash of wide, dark eyes and pale, heart-shaped face.

"A pleasure to meet you too, Ciene from High Rock," the Nord answered with a wide-eyed nod. "You'll have to put up acres of wards if you want to do any summoning work here – this whole place is a matricial nightmare, thought it may not have sunk in as such as of yet, and one of the functional side effects of that, or so I have been told, is a redoubled resistance to even momentary liminal aperture arcana – but no doubt you'll be equal to the task."

"I… hadn't noticed that," Ciene replied quietly. "But I see what you mean. I'll have to think about it."

Odfrin nodded simply, and turned on to Alusan, who had eased back into a lumpy pouf with his hands cushioned behind his head in his black fuzz.

"Don't look at me, I'm just the bodyguard," he said, shooting an easy look and twitching his narrow hips to jog his scabbarded sword. "'Cause someone's got to keep this lot safe from all the knife-ears hereabouts."

"Oh, come on!" exclaimed Miles disbelievingly as the group erupted in similar indignant squawks and scoffs and sent an array of frowns showering down on the Redguard's mock-innocently amazed head. "You're hardly _just _our bodyguard, Alusan-who-walks-the-waves-and-chats-with-cephalomer."

"It's not like you know more than any of us about hemi-temporal geographical shifts, or anything," put in Ciene sarcastically, sliding more inter herself. "See how well we would do in this place without you!"

"And of course he's not one of the College's few mages with a certification in developmental theology," put in Ildonis. "No, Alusan's just our spell-sword for hire, here to preserve us from the natives. Of course he is."

The Redguard pursed his lips as he frowned around at us slowly. "I do believe," he said, "that you all are trying to imply, in your sneaky, sideways manner, that I have some training in more theoretical areas of magicka than the sword and the fireball. I must apologize for my wards, Odfrin; they're usually not so duplicitous with strangers – it must be the effects of the voyage still –" A hissing crackle through the air, and Alusan sat suddenly straight up in his seat, his wiry black hair popping a bright momentary halo of sparks. Tsabhi lashed her tail and purred happily as he slumped back into his pouf and waved a hand weakly in the air.

"All right, all right, fine, you're right. I admit it," he sighed, rubbing a spot on his thigh. "They speak the truth, lady," he said to a giggling, twinkle-eyed Odfrin, "although I must insist that I really do think the Assemblage chose to send me to keep an eye on the rest of you. I'm really better with my own research than I am with communicating with the locals and stealing theirs."

"That's what Jon's for, anyway," Miles said, nodding to me.

Odfrin twisted her body toward me, leaning back deeper into the cushions to cock an interested eye at me. "Oh?" she said. "And what does that mean?" She kept rubbing her thumbs over the back of my hand as she had been doing for the last few minutes.

"It means that I'm the linguistics specialist here," I answered. "It's my job to understand the locals, and, hopefully, to help us make some interesting discoveries while we're here. Jon Urfe, Specialist in Poly-Spectral Techniques and Phenomena. At your service."

"'Understand the locals,' hmmm?" mused Odfrin quietly, ice blue eyes watching me with sudden reserve despite the press of my lips on the back of her hand. "Well, perhaps you can… but I advise you not to rely upon it." I held her eyes seriously for a long few moments without making a reply. Then she gave her bright head a little shake and turned back to the ringed group.

"It is a delight, a pure delight to have you all here," she said, smiling around at us all. "I couldn't tell you when Daniel finally left, but it's been a fair while now and I have to admit I wondered whether the Assemblage hadn't just forgotten to send me some company. And oh, here's the brew done, and we all need some warming and loosening up inside, so no time to waste!" And the steaming samovar was quite suddenly surrounded by a swirling flock of teacups, each promenading around and down for their turn under the spiky spout and their dram of the aromatic black liquid it dispensed. "Which Cynosure are you all from, anyway?" Odfrin went on as the filled cups floated around on their saucers to my waiting colleagues. I caught mine in my teeth just barely as it was about to spill; the damn thing flew right over and away from my grasping fingers. I thought at first that the Nord was just a bit absentminded with her spellwork, but as I removed the saucer from between my incisors I caught a mischievous twinkling spark struck off in my direction from her eyes, and she squeezed the hand she _still _had not released.

"Mis-cand," Ciene choked out, oddly stiff and staring at me for some reason.

"What was that, dear?" Odfrin asked kindly.

"Miscarcand, she means," Miles put in helpfully, sipping from his tea cup gingerly. "We're from the Miscarcand Cynosure."

"Oh ho!" the Nord exclaimed suddenly, drawing back and eyeing us with a new light in her eyes. "So they've finally broken open the inner vaults, have they? _Well, _I just hope you six are as much better than the rest of us as your Cynosure's reputation boasts, because if you're not it will be one long disillusionist's ride for you here in Alinor, and perhaps worse when you return to the Assemblage and their results-rapacity."

The lot of us blinked blankly at her, nonplussed. Tsabhi lapped at her drink quietly.

"Oh, dear," Odfrin went on, taking a sip and blushing embarrassedly. "I'm sorry, very sorry. I forgot that you wouldn't even know you'd been sequestered together apurpose. Please, think no more of it. Let us just enjoy our drinks now and discuss something different. Maybe you have questions?"

There was a long, silent pause as we glanced awkwardly around at each other. I cannot speak for the others, of course, but I know I was wondering just how long in truth the poor woman had been left alone. At last Ildonis spoke up.

"Well," he mused, peering down into his cup, comically tiny in those large fingers, "there is the obvious thing, of course. We've just had most of our most prized belongings destroyed by the Thalmor and the Dominion's restrictions on the importation of soul-bound material. Should we expect anything else like that as we go along, or was that the worst, as Jon insists?"

Odfrin was shaking her head violently before he had even finished. "Oh, _why _is it always this way?" she cried. "It doesn't matter _what _you try; the new crowds always end up bringing things they shouldn't! Torture to stay, but _impossible _to leave, this place!" she huffed angrily. "There… is no real answer to that question," she went on after a moment, more calmly. "It all depends on what you try to do and how vile the particular elf overseer is on that particular day. The chances are that something else will happen, but it's really all quite unpredictable, with these lowest of the low elves. The only thing I could guarantee," she said, "would be that anything you do in here should have no consequences from the Thalmor. But even there, there might be a first time. We never know."

"What else could they possibly take from us?" Ciene snapped. "_Most _of us have nothing of value left." I did not miss the barb in her words.

Odfrin's soft shoulders shrugged. "I know, I know, but hush, hush, my dear. It does not due to tempt or challenge the Thalmor. Insult, yes, but not challenge. They think it very amusing to turn our words on their heads and prove us both naïve and ignorant. So quiet."

"Do they hear us even here?" Miles asked in a sudden, hushed whisper.

The Nord's mouth twisted. "Where do they not hear us, save under the protection of the heart-talk their cold immortality cannot fathom? This is Alinor, Miles. Who knows where that spot in the air may twist, and through what ears our words may tangle? We need not guard our tongues overmuch – they are too overproud to think what we speak carries any import – but challenges and temptations are plain foolishness. I have seen it proven."

She fell silent, pale eyes staring moodily down into her cup. The rest of us did likewise, all save me no doubt brooding on their lost treasures, but even I must admit myself to have been dampened by the woman's words. At last Miles straightened up, draining the last drops of black liquid from his cup and setting it and its chipped saucer on the low circular hearth.

"Well, everyone, difficult as it is to tell in this city, by my reckoning we should still have half of a day left. So I'm off for a little exploration of this city, along with whoever cares to join me."

"What?" squawked Odfrin, leaping up and releasing my hand in shock. "What? You want to leave? Why?"

Miles blinked bemusedly down at her. "To learn of this place, madame. That is why we came, after all."

"Oh, but –" she sputtered, "but, really, don't you think you'd rather rest on your first day here?"

"I am not particularly fatigued," he answered. "So, no. I would rather get started with what we are here to do. I have a mind to find this School of Thoughts and Calculations and talk to them myself."

"Nobody _finds _the School," Odfrin scoffed. "It's a _strand synthetic, _you, you – oh, you wouldn't have any luck. Nobody does."

The Imperial raised an eyebrow at her. "Perhaps no one _yet," _he said, "but I cannot let that stop _me _from trying." He took a few steps toward the narrow door.

"Ooh, you arrogant Miscarcand hothouse scholars!" Odfrin gasped, stamping her foot. "I'm telling you, _don't go out there!_"

"You seem quite emphatic about this, Odfrin," I understated, standing up and laying a hand on her shoulder. "Is there some reason Miles should not begin his explorations now? Why all of us should not begin now?"

"Yes!" she gasped vehemently. "Because it's _not safe!_ You don't know where we _are, _yet. Really, really, _really, _it's not safe. Just wait until tomorrow! Please? _Please?_"

The sunburned Imperial shot me an exasperated look over Odfrin's pleading, earnest head, and I responded with a tiny jerk of my own away from the door. He frowned displeasedly and hesitated a few moments, but then threw up his arms in capitulation.

"Fine!" he grumbled. "Tomorrow, then."

"Ohhh, thank you!" squealed Odfrin in relief, rushing forward and throwing her round arms about Miles' middle in a tight hug. "Thank you thank you thank you!"

The disappointed man blinked in grumpy surprise, but then relaxed into a helplessly charmed smile and patted her back through her mass of bushy golden hair.

"Oh, it's not such a big thing," he said kindly. "I probably _could _do with a day of relaxation, before we begin. We all could, I imagine." He looked pointedly around at the rest of us.

"Definitely," Alusan agreed without a hitch. "Why, I've been positively decimated by that trip. Fit for nothing but the lounge."

"I need to review my notes on Altmeri grammar and culture anyway before I'd feel confident acting as translator," I said. "A day inside will be just the thing."

"I don't think I could muster the energy to make it out anyway," Ciene added fervently. "I'd stay in with you even if everyone else wants to go."

Odfrin stepped back from Miles' chest, smiling with a brightness fit to beat the sun, her eyes glistening like stars through tears.

"You're wonderful people," she said with a quiet, overwhelmed joy. She slipped her hand back into mine. "Wonderful people. I know it must seem silly – but trust me. I know more of this place than you. It is best this way."

She blinked a teary smile around at us, squeezing my hand. Then she visibly gathered the trailing threads of her personality together in one cohesive tangle and set into brisk activity.

"Now, we must get you all settled, mustn't we? I don't have an unlimited spatial allotment, of course, nor an infinite number of habitable cells, unfortunately, so I think some of you will have to share a space. I'm very sorry about that, but –"

"It's no problem," chirped Ciene with an odd brightness. "I'll share!"

"Why thank you," Odfrin answered with a soft smile. "Then I'll put you and Tsabhi together over _there,_" she pointed to one of the doors in the chamber's facets; it burst briskly open to receive the three dark bags shooting through the air toward it, "Alusan _there _and Ildonis _there,_" she pointed to two more doors in the rust-tinted walls, which likewise opened and swallowed the luggage of their appointed resident, "Miles _there,_" another door, "and Jon…" She turned toward me with a shining in her pale eyes, dimples in her cheeks and her underlip between her teeth. "… no more rooms, I'm afraid, so you'll have to share too." My hand tingled suddenly in hers as those dimples deepened. "So off with Miles with you," she said mischievously – and, admittedly, to my disappointed surprise – and flicked my bag into the room with one pink, telekinetic finger.

"Over there is my room," she went on, pointing to one of the few undesignated doors, "so if any of you ever need anything, day or night," her eyes flickered toward me, "please don't worry about disturbing me. It gives me nothing but joy to have you here; I'm delighted to help in whatever ways I can."

And that was Odfrin, indeed; always doing whatever she could to help us in whatever ways we needed, whether we knew it or not. That was how it was, in Alinor urban, in the Embassy; wherever we looked, wherever we went, whatever we did, we saw some sign of Odfrin's incredible love for us all; the cup of tea and tray of breakfast waiting every morning, always hot and fresh for each of us despite our disparate sleeping habits because Odfrin knew when we would awake better than we could ourselves; the eternally tidied rooms regardless of our inattendance – except for Tsabhi's and Ciene's, of course, who preferred the clutter; the miraculously cleaned clothes and polished boots, the primly made beds and precisely warmed heating pans, all done without our observation, by Odfrin's invisible, nurturing telekinetic hand; the bright smiles and warm hugs when she laid eyes on any of us, the open and sincere interest in who we were and what we thought; the riveted pale eyes and slightly opened mouth as we talked about ourselves; the almost savant's understanding of us and of our understandings ourselves. The incredible skill with which she ferreted out the similarities between us of which we had been oblivious and used them to knit us closer together, joining Ildonis and Tsabhi in their secret confectioner's connoisseurship, Ciene and Alusan by mutual fascination with trans-mundane fossilry, Miles and I by our long-repressed delight in and childhood experiences with the transcendent boys' bell choirs of Dibella. She drew out our secret fantasies and fascinations, our hidden pasts and lonely sorrows and showed us that we were not alone in them; she bound us together, all of us to all of us, in mutual humanity – yes, even Tsabhi – but above all in our love for her, the golden-haired, golden-hearted caretaker of our souls and our sanities in that cold urbanity.

That was Odfrin, our sole comfort. Our _souls' _comfort. That _is _Odfrin, gods help me, outside of this sundered solitude, back in the city proper. She is there still, and still her incredible, loving, slightly touched self – while I am here, alone, comfortless, bereft, pining. Empty, without her warm, embracing arms. And that is why, truly _why, _this has been so difficult… because I have never wished to leave anyone less than I wished to leave Odfrin when the Thalmor came to take me. Mara forgive me for having done it anyway. And that lady of love as my witness, I shall never do it again, if ever I may be so blessed as to return to her arms. Vowed and vowed, in love and love.

Gods, but it's true that I don't usually talk about what really bothers me… and this is why. There's no real point in it; the warmth of memory has dispelled the numbness to reality I had accumulated. Even dreams might be a lesser torture than this freshened wound. Gods. I – Mara hep me. I cannot go on.

Jon Urfe

in correspondence with

Jon Urfe

28 Mid Year, 4E XXX


	11. Chapter 10

**AN: Ok, so, anyone who thinks that I'm incomprehensible first needs to go read the Sermons of Vivec again and then needs to walk over to The Imperial Library and read a few more of Michael Kirkbride's pieces.  
**

**Chapter X**

Tiptoes and baby steps. Peer around the corner; is it safe? Aye, empty and hollow as an elf's heart, save for the pervasive amber glow. Now; tiptoes and baby steps again down the strange amorphous hallway and see what's up ahead, what's down below, what's behind that door, what is this place for?

By tiptoes and baby steps did curiousity wake from its bruised, abused slumber; wake, and begin to exercise in exploration, at last ready to escape its long repression. Yes, regardless of his continued stubborn intractability, his forays into emotional masochism, and his self-professed angst-driven condemnation of his host, Jon Urfe was indeed returning, little by little, on tiptoes and baby steps, to his normal open, accepting, understanding self. It had taken over a month for his inherent curiousity to crack his shell of cold rejection, true, but then he did have a considerable foundation and motivation to his walls and his angst, as you have now seen. Perhaps we might even go so far as to say that, under such circumstances, it is remarkable even that he began to return to himself after even such a short time as that; after all, there are legions upon legions of men and woman in your world for whom we should have been fools to expect adjustment of any measurable degree even within years. The human capacity for the holding of grudges is truly remarkable. It pales beside that of the elves, of course, but that is beside the point. What matters is that Jon was – healing, if we can call it that – with a truly incredible speed, and tiptoeing once more into the insatiability of his own curiousity.

But he was not, by any means, fully there yet; not even close to his normal bold openness; nowhere near his characteristic casual adventurous investigations and daring forays into the unknown. Recovery is ever a slow process – a process measured in tiptoes and baby steps. So we should not be surprised that Jon did not immediately sally forth into life at large in the solum, did not accost every elf he saw with inquires both personal and professional, did not inundate himself with information from every source he could possibly inveigle into obliging. We should expect him to do exactly what he did; to go creeping, slow and quiet and terrified, out from his rooms in the solum's rocky depths and looking all about him through the amber gloom for sign of a dreaded elf come striding along to drag him off to his interrogation; to go furtive and fleeting away from the solum's central hollow and center of activity; to go on tiptoes and baby steps down and out instead, to the depths of the amorphous halls below, where he might satisfy his bruised curiousity without the fear of discovery. Tiptoes and baby steps.

Again forward, and duck beneath that accordion arch; straighter now, and then flat against the concave slope of the bowed wall. No signs of anyone anywhere, but the place is a labyrinth and the edaphomancers do not wear shoes to give themselves away in echoes. Jon hasn't the foggiest where he's going, really, though he knows where he's been; he always did have a natural memory for paths and directions, no matter how tangled. He can make his way back to his rooms just fine, but up ahead? Just the diffuse amber glow and the silhouette of rock and soil. These halls barely seem constructed by the hands of mortals at all; branching, sloping, spiraling, gaping into caverns and cramping into shimmy-shafts, seemingly without plan or purpose or destination, rough and smooth by turns, stepped or ramped at random, open or crisscrossed in bulbous formations, in accordions and amoebas, without the slightest attention to functionality. It is as though the elves somehow took a mold of the interior of an incredibly complex and non-uniform knot and magnified it a hundred thousand times to pour out their supratiered subterranean maze, Jons steps traced in the tangle's complex conglomerations of interstice. More realistic to say that it is a natural formation, perhaps; and, indeed, the only element that truly gives the lies to such a notion is the omnipresent red-gold glow oozing out from the veins of glass raising rigid ridges through and along the walls, roots shot out from massive pylons far above, shuttling the light of day down into black Nirn. The walls seem like stone, though pitted and irregular as the place wholly, but – Jon rests a hand on an outcropping, and lifts it away from the surprisingly spongy surface moistened and heavy with the musk of the earth, the scent of the soil to which he had almost numbed himself through the last month. Not stone, but _soil, _the earth itself – for Jon has not yet found the solum's boundaries, not yet surpassed the maximum pedogenic depth. Soil, made firm and strong to hold up the halls' cavities, yet somehow, impossibly, unlessened in its friability. The sorcery of the edaphomancers at last demonstrated, Jon attributed it (though we must realize, of course, that he has been feeling their sorceries now for longer than he could have imagined).

Still stuck in the soil up here, and really, can you _believe _that? Has the stuff no end, in this land? Has the city-isle no bedrock? Is there no _escape _from the stuff? Is there no freedom? Well; then down, and see how deep these edaphomancers have delved and developed. Roll the corner, jump the ledge, slip down the spiral slide, and no cares for discovery now, in Jon; he runs full out, boots slapping but their echoes trapped in the place's dampening irregularity. And still no change; all is amber and crushed velvet silhouettes. But don't give up, don't give up! And three curling loops, a sharp-edged left, and a snake's coil later and Jon is stumbling down a steep set of uneven stairs, breathing hard on exertion and the newly rediscovered thrill of discovery, on the supersaturated possibility of the labyrinth and –

And choking on the sudden gasp of cavity, on the yawning draw of abyss both above and below, on the web of enormous netted columns steeped organic black and slinging the amber-misted void in bunches like over-tense ropes or cast-iron chains as enormous as the city-isle's mirror-towers, tangling and snaring and binding the earth and its warm, wet, palpitating hollow, on the sprawl of ledges and balconies and stairs and ramps and arches and ladders and ropes and shining glass spires in the gloom and pathways, pathways, pathways melding and mixing and mingling and tingling and tangling in such a conjugal confluence of possibilities that his single eye shudders and flutters and spasms along the infinitely entangled subterranean matrix of could and would and will and must, of conception and nascence and space and time and times and Times and – and – and -

And Jon gasps, wondrous, at the sight.

"What is this place?" he whispers.

And, "Patala," he is answered.

Now please, please, step away from the moment's immediacy. I mean it. There. Ready? Good. It behooves us to view the rest of this day in hindsight.

Jon spun around in shock at the voice's rough grate; he had satisfied himself that there were not any elves about in the lower tunnels, and so no one to find him. And, indeed, his follower was no elf. It was Falif, Jon's goblin servant, hunched and flickeringly golden in his haze-lit satin, blue eyes shining out at his master, piercing through the gloom.

"Well I say, good fellow," Jon stuttered after he had caught his fleeing heart and shoved it forcibly back down his throat and into its relevant cavity, "I _say, _there's no need to sneak up on a man like that."

"Weren't sneaking," Falif replied evenly as he limped forward. "Juss wal'n. You'ns was sneaking, though, weren youn's, wizud?"

"Mmm, well," hemmed Jon, pursing his lips. "I would have called it more of a circumspect stroll myself, but you're free to interpret as you see fit. I'm not entirely certain where Tsirelsyn's blessing ends, so I may have been a bit furtive about my travel."

"Dunno," the goblin answered simply as it drew level with Jon, its bulbous head peering out from between its massive shoulders at the vault and its massive-mazed galleries, though whether he referred to the extent of Tsirelsyn's permitted exploration or to Jon's furtiveness was quite unclear.

"Why youn's wants to come here?" Falif went on. "Alwez youn's upside, not down here. I wuz thinkings you'ns did notta know about Patala."

"I _didn't _know," Jon admitted wryly, eyeing the goblin from the corner of his eye with a new interest. "Is that what this place is called? 'Patala?'"

"Yes. No. Yes-no. No-yes. Itsum –" The goblin sighed heavily, shaking his white-wrapped head in frustration. "_Thisn's _um solum," he struggled out through his rough Tamrielic, his long gloved finger pointed before him, "_thatn's, _but in stones, is Patala," he gestured back the way they had come, "as sez the soil weaveners. But wezn's are lazy, and we'zns just calls all of it under ta eart 'Patala.'"

"I… see," Jon answered slowly, not certain that he saw at all, his linguist's mind working automatically, obsessively, on the deciphering of a new accent more than on the actual import of the goblin's words. It sank in with a few moments, though; "So this is part of the solum," he clarified, waving out at the vast array of columns and spiraling platforms, "but back there is called 'Patala'?"

"_In the stones, _isa Patala," Falif said patiently, bobbing his head in assent. "Not soil; the _stones._"

"Mm, I see," the human nodded back. "So in the stone beyond the soil lies Patala. Very good. What is all this about, then?"

The goblin turned a large blue eye on him searchingly, green skin wrinkled between the folds of his white shroud as though in a frown. "Wizud mean's whut?"

"This place," Jon repeated, waving again, "this part of the solum. What is it for? What is its purpose?"

Still that same drawn back, dubious, querying stare. The human smiled weakly in riposte, and looked away.

"Wizud," Falif said at last, "doesn't know wery much, does'ee? Thisn's um _farm, _wizud. Thisn's um _solum. '_Air." And he curled his long fingers gently around Jon's wrist. He tugged the human forward onto the ramp at the base of the steep steps, out among the massive black pillars and sweeping, glowing glass spirals. He stopped a short distance in, where their path passed hard by a column ringed in wide balconies. The goblin lifted Jon's wrist as a pointer.

"See um?" he said. "_See um?" _And Jon did. He saw that the massive black skew of the rope-pillar before him was covered in vegetation, in innumerable tiny, succulent branches bushing and bursting and bulging out toward the nurturing amber light, in emerald tendrils prickling and tickling the dark, in pale gold blossoms and fleshy, bobbing white fruit, growing not from pots or ledges of soil riveted to stone, but from the dark substance of the twined, looping pillar itself, tangling white roots together through the enchanted black crumblings of the suspended soil-stone, saw that such was the case all throughout the humid, webbed cavity's depths; bunched and twisted pillars of soil-stone all bursting with verdancy veiled in amber and gloom, all clasped and knotted in stems and leaves and roots and shoots; saw that it was all of it but massive, daunting chains of interwoven _life, _stringing and clinging and strangling out, down, up, in, and through the solum, binding in paedogenic, ecosystemic magnetism everything with which it came in contact, from worms to rock to seeds to semen to you to me to We to space to time and times and Times…

And of course Jon realized only the barest fraction of what he saw.

"It's a farm," he breathed. And indeed it was, at some level; a massive subterranean plantation, its every wall a substrate for production, quietly creeping with crops fed on the purloined light of day, plunging down, down, down into the city-isle, into the earth, into Nirn, an inverted tower of agriculture.

"Incredible," he murmured, staring around at the budding, mossy walls of earth. "What is that being grown?" he asked excitedly, pointing to the quasi-mistletoe succulent bush-branches pushing their quiet way out from the soil-stone all around. "There's so much of it. It must be important. I wonder if I can find –" He began looking busily about him for a way over to a balcony around one of the pillars.

"No, no, no!" barked Falif in alarm, catching Jon short with his grip on the man's wrist. "Wizud must not touch! Not'n for youn's! Not'n for youn's! Wizud will make wery many works for we'z!"

Jon turned abruptly back toward his white-clad servant, frowning in sudden thought. He sucked his teeth for a moment, watching the goblin's clear eyes and the long fingers encircling his wrist. Jon was a big man – thought not tall – and naturally strong; even barring magic the goblin could not stop him if he decided to take a closer look, but…

"Falif," he mused slowly, "is there some rule against my presence here, or my investigation of the place? Like the rules against entering the fields?"

The bulbous white head bobbed once. "This'ns _is _um field," Falif replied. "'Junctions um are the same as upside in down: nunuvum men's to touch the soils."

"I see… and will you be in trouble if I break this rule?"

The blue eyes widened. "Wery great, wizud. Wery great, and wery lots of works to repairs. Subside um solum soils morn fragile, delcatinum upsides."

Jon nodded slowly. "W-Very well. I will not attempt any closer examinations against the soil sorcerers' 'junctions. You may release me." The goblin assented, but slowly and warily, loosening his fingers one by one and letting them slip off Jon's wrist only a short way, plainly ready to seize him again should he attempt to run. The human waited patiently, and merely turned to lean against the irregular rail of algae'd soil along their bridge's edge, peering out at the vast subterranean agricultural heaven. "Don't worry," he reassured his servant kindly. "I will not get you in trouble or cause you great works. I do have some questions, though, if you're allowed to answer."

"Querynums?" the goblin repeated uncertainly. "Whysoo ask querynums from me?"

Jon shrugged lightly. "I am curious. I know very little of this place, this island, its people. You live here, so certainly you know more than I."

Falif pulled back his large head to peer at Jon from frowning blue eyes; a long, weighing, inscrutable look the human could only meet with an uncertain smile.

"Acquiesced," the goblin delivered at last, still staring. "So ask um."

Jon nodded his thanks. "Well – to begin with – where exactly are we in Arbasdiil?"

The goblin grunted and finally released Jon from his blue eyes, turning instead to look out over the amber murk like the human. "We'z um in'd center," he answered. "Not such-so far from um topside, smackda below the entry shaft."

"I see. So there are more direct ways to get here than the route I took?"

Falif barked briskly. "Most all um straighter dum yourn's, wizud. We'z ums using this place all of the times; we'z cannot be to move so zig-and-zag. Inefficient."

"Indeed…" Jon agreed. "Indeed. Do the edaphomancers use this place as well, then, or just your people?"

Again the weighing, inscrutable, withdrawn stare down the goblin's shrouded green nose. Jon forwent the smile this time, instead waiting silently for an answer.

"Them ums soilers are doing the works, really," the goblin said, slowly, after another long pause. "We'z ums are just carrying. Is the Son's solum, not um _peons._"

The human shook his head wryly, smiling down into the gaping dark. The fellow's Tamrielic vocabulary was interesting, to say the least, and telling of its acquisition.

"So what is it you do here?" he went on after a pause. "I have not seen such a crop before, either on the mainland or in the fields above. What is its name?"

Another flash of the stare, but shorter. "Wizud is not see'in um because ums not there," he answered. "Is a subsoil crop _only._"

"Ah, I see," the human replied. "And its name?"

"We'z calls it haoma, wizud, and so'z um Highnesses."

Jon turned the word over on his tongue and in his mind, pondering. Haoma. Haoma. Haoma. An Altmeri word, to be sure, but one he had never before encountered. He would have to investigate its etymology more deeply when he had a chance.

"Haoma… hmmm… and what is its use, I wonder?"

The goblin just shrugged his huge shoulders. "Things. Seed um up pod is… import."

Jon cocked an eyebrow. "In what way?"

"For um paramount," Falif answered cryptically. "And um is all, ask of um haoma not. Wizud's isn't supposed to know." Which was, of course, precisely the wrong thing to say to a newly awoken curiousity such as Jon's. He let the matter go, though, on the surface, long experience telling him that patience would bear him more and richer fruits than haste.

"Very well," he said, "acquiesced. May I ask another question, though?"

Falif peered up at him uncertainly, and answered only after a long probing search of the human's single eye. He answered with a suspicious slur. "Acquiesced."

Jon shifted his stance against the rail, easing onto his arm to look more closely at his servant. "No doubt you will not be surprised to learn," he began, "that I was not best pleased by the circumstances of our first… meeting. I have been wondering, since then, why it was – necessary. Tsirelsyn's explanation was… unsatisfactory. Perhaps yours will be better. Why is my presence in the fields such a negative occurrence as to necessitate so dramatic a response?"

Falif frowned. "Youn's wanting to know… why's um you hurts the soils?"

"I don't believe that I _did," _Jon defended. "But perhaps it would be simpler if you just explained why I am not permitted in the actual fields, both upside and down."

"Because um's you'ns kills the soils, wizud," the goblin answered exasperatedly, as though it was obvious. "Wery badly kills! So does every um, even Highnesses except the soilers with their tangled love walks. But youn's, youn's mannoids ums the wery baddest of the wery bad."

"I think you'll find that you're mistaken about that, Falif," Jon replied sadly, shaking his head. "How many men have you known? We are no worse than the Highnesses."

"The _wery baddest,_" Falif repeated stubbornly, "of the _wery bad._"

The human sighed, belaboring to himself the ill favors the elves had done for their slaves' minds. "All right, all right," was what he said, though, bowing to the moment. "So tell me this, then: what is it that makes us the wery baddest of the wery bad?"

"Pedogenocide," the goblin whispered. "Youn's kills the soils."

"How so?" Jon shot back, frowning. "We care for our soils. What about us makes you think we kills soils?"

Falif bobbed his head in a slow figure eight from side to side, the ridge of his green nose crinkled between the folds of his shroud as though scrunched up in uncertainty or inability to explain.

"Because of um _bones,_" he tried helplessly, staring intently at Jon and pressing the palm of one huge hand earnestly against the air. "Um _bones. _Youn's got wrong measuredup. Too much um kinwuh and airgon, wery littl'n the ambricols, sawwy?"

The human frowned. "I don't understand any of that. What are you trying to say about bones?"

A short, frustrated puff of air through the goblin's hidden nostrils flared out his satin face mask. "Because of um _bones," _he tried again. "Youn's um wizud, youn's knows um bones. Because um a-balanced wibbled to wery wrong, youn's wery baddest for um soils. Youn's is cutting wery too muchly. Youn's is stomping wery too hardly. Youn's is rippin up all of um aggregates, wery to finely. Its' – um – _bones!_" He punctuated his last three words with forceful jabs of one long finger through Jon's robes and into his ribs.

"That's enough," the human barked sternly, putting on his serious face and catching the goblin's hand as it went in for another jab. "There's no need to get physical." The goblin just looked at his human ward silently, nonplussed.

"Now I don't know what you're trying to get at _exactly," _Jon went on, still stern, "but it sounds like you think humanity kills the soil just as an inherent part of who we are. It's in our bones, you think? As natural as it is for you to think so, living under the elves as you do, in utter isolation from humanity, such um generalizations are simply, as a rule, false. You don't know us, Falif. You have no idea what we are. I am the only man you have ever met, am I not. You can not possibly have seen evidence from me that would prove what the Highnesses have told you about humanity. So do not be so quick to pass judgement."

The goblin but stared once more, with the same inscrutability and wild-eyed doubt, his chin tucked down by his collar in alarm.

"Wizud," he let out slowly, "it is werily ewident. You are the wery baddest of the wery bad!"

Jon gave a rough sigh and pushed away from the railing. "_Wery well, _then," he snipped, "I will not attempt to dissuade you from your prejudices any further. If you please, I think I will return to my rooms, now. As interesting as… _Patala _and this subterranean _haoma _plantation have been, as I am not permitted a closer investigation I see no benefit in tarrying further here. Attend."

The human set off back the way he had come, without even a backward glance for the vast vertical farm or his trailing goblin servant, back into the amorphous web of layered interstice and enchanted soil-stone surrounding it, too preoccupied with his own frustration to notice the continued confused disturbance and mental percolation trickling through the goblin's staring blue eyes as he followed the human's rigid back, to stiff with his still easily miffed pride to consider the servant's words in any other light than that in which they had first struck him, and underlying it all too arrogant in his own linguistic skill to believe that a mere goblin had surpassed him in communication, had understood Jon's meaning when he had failed to understand Falif's. He was not the Jon Urfe of old, yet, the Jon Urfe submerged as deep as he could go in the pool of uncertainty. He was the Jon Urfe yet creeping through the shallows… on tiptoes and baby steps.

And so they passed through the tangled, irregular hallways surrounding the solum's vertical farm shaft, wiggling upward to Jon's chambers in twists and jerks and squiggles by the retraced vagaries of the human's initial path; for Jon of course did not slow his rapid stride to allow his hunched and limping servant to catch him up and point out the more direct path. The goblin had rebuffed and refuted him, and shamed his comprehension skills to boot – though he did not admit such even to himself – and thus in his reflexive, half-bland defense, Jon took unconscious revenge on the poor creature; he punished his servant with the goblin's own wretched, limping painful imperfection and reaffirmed himself with his own physical superiority. Shameful, outrageous, petty, despicable – but remember: tiptoes and baby steps.

Jon drew to a halt before his age-ravined wooden door, his hand impatient on the metal latch, lips tight and face harsh in the close orange glow of the wall's strip of glass as Falif came huffing and puffing, lurching and limping out of the strange halls after him. He frowned down as his servant settled his stooped back before him, like a priest above a deformed supplicant. The goblin still wore that same weighing, disturbed blue stare.

"I will admit that I had hoped your kind might have minds, such as they are, more open to the acquisition of new ideas than those of your overlords," he said sternly. "I admit myself disappointed. Nevertheless, I urge you to think over what I have said. We are not so different, my people and I, as you have been led to believe." The goblin's stare hitched a bit higher into disturbance, the bulbous eyes bulging up at Jon popping a little wider. He made no sound, though, and the human heaved a short sigh.

"Very well, then," he said stiffly, "you may go. Resume your duties tomorrow as normal. I will have no further need of you tonight."

The door slipped open, and then shut, but the goblin did not move. He stood, staring at the ancient door, perplexed, his huge head tilting by degrees to one side in consternation, as though faced in his master with an insoluble predicament. He stared, in confusion, in disturbance, in the unnerved equilibration of one who has just had a brush with Jon's god of uncertainty, but not, amazingly, in hate or anger. No, despite that Jon had blatantly insulted and intentionally maligned him and his people, Falif did not mutter crude words or curse with his huge hands, did not snarl or sneer, scowl or brood. He only stared, unnerved and curious and struggling to understand… and then turned, abruptly, and vanished away into the dark halls.

And behind his high, cracked wooden door our Jon was left to pace away his unfed evening, in frustration, in insult, in a struggling, blind dissonance with himself and his actions that he could not have put to words if he had tried, wearing a smooth strip in the stone floor with his strides… just as he wore a shiny blip in Alinor's knotted hide with his tiptoes and his baby-bumbling stumbles.


	12. Chapter 11

**AN: I really don't know where you people are getting all this stuff about 'obscure' and 'incomprehensible.' This is neither. I mentioned Michael to show what those really look like, not to imply that I'm trying to be him. I am not.  
**

**(Incidentally, you might find it - interesting - to go and Google 'The Ogmismol.' For comparison purposes, perhaps.)  
**

**Chapter XI**

You have been lied to. Deceived. You have been fed a falsehood, without qualm or remorse. Most likely, you have swallowed it, without question or pause, for it was not the manner of misrepresentation that one would expect in a man's private journals. But the fact remains: Jon Urfe has slipped you an untruth – or three. For when Jon Urfe said, in correspondence with himself, that it was his colleague, Miles the Mildewed, who rose that first day in Alinor and proposed an exploration of the city, he spoke nothing but a lie. It was not Miles with whom Odfrin argued and pleaded that day, but Jon himself; Jon who effervesced eager earnestness and irrepressible desire for investigation; Jon who demanded an immediate and comprehensive survey of the elven capitol; Jon who argued with Odfrin and her desperate icy eyes far longer and more stubbornly than he represents Miles to have done; Jon who at last bowed with ill grace to the combined weight of his alarmed colleagues' subtle body cues and Odfrin's distraught protests; and Jon who received the Nord woman's warm, thankful embrace as reward. And with this lie did he stilt himself in his own journals; with this lie did deceive you.

But hold; we must understand the nature and cause of Jon's falsehood before we break out in blisters of righteous judgement and miffed censure; we must understand that Jon's enhancement of the truth was utterly unintentional. Jon lied to himself, as much as he lied to us. Indeed, he was completely unconscious that he had recorded anything but the plain truth. Why should a man lie purposefully in his own private journals? The last thing Jon wanted then was for anyone else to see how he spoke to and of himself (having seen such yourself, perhaps you will sympathize with the sentiment); he had neither reason nor motivation to misrepresent events. That he did so anyway should itself be indicative of the action's instinctive, subconscious nature, as should the very content of the lie itself; why would anyone consciously fabricate a story over such a simple and innocuous happening? It is ridiculous; no one would lie about whether or not they were the one who argued for an afternoon outing! And yet – Jon Urfe did. Jon Urfe could do nothing else.

It was his eye that caused it; one more manifestation of Jon's inability to comprehend coexistent preclusions. As he was incapable of seeing simultaneously both the good and the bad in a situation, or of crediting the existence of hermaphrodites, so was Jon incapable of understanding himself as anything but a single, eternal, unchanging personality, burst fully formed and immutable from his mother's womb. He could comprehend himself in only one way at any given time, and that single comprehension carried through and superimposed itself upon each and every one of his memories, small to large, warping his words and his actions to fit with the currently in vogue iteration of self. Perhaps we all do this to some extent, but most of us are capable of realizing our own growth and admitting the truth of our own actions, with the assistances of others if not on our own; Jon, for all his intellect and understanding, was not. A peculiar handicap, to be sure, for a man devoted to the complexities of comprehension – but such is the power of symbolism in your myth-webbed world.

At any rate, thus did Jon's falsehood arise; through the deviation of who he was upon his arrival in Alinor from who he was amongst the Kemendelia after months in the city-isle. The Jon the seas delivered onto Alinor's sharp-edged shores was glowing, enthusiastic, charming, overflowing with optimism; the Jon who etched his thoughts upon his crystalline relay journal in Arbasdiil was depressed, withdrawn, and alienated from all interest in Alinorian life – or life in general. _That _Jon would never have demanded immediate reconnaissance through the city of the elves out of simple, overwhelming curiousity and eagerness, and so _that _Jon could not fathom that he had indeed done just that; no, no, it was Miles who played that part, not he. He had been the force of reason and reserve holding the overeager young fellow back, of course, nothing else. He had not jumped up from his seat and sung a little traveler's ditty in anticipation; no, that would be ridiculous. He could not have done that. Nor could he have possibly been so bold and open as to begin wooing and winking at the lonely Odfrin within moments of meeting her; she had simply attached herself to him by virtue of his having been the one to break her solitude. Of couse. Such was the unconscious amendment of Jon's recollections. The effect was in truth more pervasive than that single identity swap, naturally, tingeing everything from inflection to phrasing to body language and beyond; it colored and sculpted his entire understanding of events; and it must necessarily colour ours. The gall of that uncertainty may be enough to incline us toward a condemnation of the man and his weak, helpless falsifications – but we must remember that Jon was neither born this way nor given any choice in the matter; his nature was consequential, as all are, dictated by events beyond his control. A single event, to be more precise to this quirk – and one which yet awaits your surveyance.

We must understand as well that could someone have explained to Jon the echo-effects that his missing eye had had upon who he was and how those effects limited him, he would have done his utmost to expunge them from his character. He was an arrogant man in his own way, our Jon – primarily from his rather accurate assessment of his own skills and their wide acknowledgement throughout the College – but in no way was he closed to criticism. He specialized in comprehension, in the pursuit of understanding; his skills in the area could not have been as strong as they were without an open willingness to admit that he might be wrong, he might be an arrogant jerk, he might be a fool and an incompetent, he might understand absolutely nothing about anything. Had someone told him of his half-blindedness, he would have done everything he could to remedy the failing. He would have failed, of course – the lost eye was strangely impervious to regeneration spells, after all – but he would have tried. For in some ways, Jon felt the troubles his handicap brought him beyond the physical, _knew _that he should be able to do more, to understand the world in some unfathomed new direction. He could not point to its cause, but the consciousness of the disconnect was there, and with it a nubbin of discontent. It niggled at him in the lulls of thoughts and the quiet hours before morning, creeping out from all the man's tangled, amended memories, from the times he had fallen deep into depression over nothing, the times he had lied to himself, the times he had embarrassed the College with his sudden inability to understand an alien dichotomy. All of his life was riddled with shredded gaps of single-sight; his disability birthed over and above enough doubt and internal anguish to unsettle him in the silences and pauses of his inquisitive internal monologue.

One might even utilize the phenomenon to explain Jon's unreasoning terror for his dreams, given their iterative multiplicity. It only makes sense that a man incapable of comprehending two versions of himself should be horrified at playing host to visions of the multiplicity of time. Perhaps his weakness was even more pronounced than usual during his time with the Kemendelia, in consequence of the alienation of the land and its people; perhaps that was why the return of dream left him drenched in clammy sweat, bloodlessly white, and catatonic on his byssus sheets in those amorphous halls when the second bout of dreams burst his – I don't know what father was thinking because they're nothing but a bunch of loony mystics. Hands-off-don't-touch-that-you-can't-do-this pack of little bitches like everyone else on the island. Father took them out to the northeastern hex this afternoon to see the paddies we drained. I couldn't believe the shit that came out of that big idiot's mouth. I don't know what it's like where he comes from but here we don't hold with all that prissy little respect nature man-spit. Like hell I'm going to stop irrigating my fields and change crops, you man-weak old fool. He actually said that we had caused our own problems. Load of shit we did. The only reason I bothered to go at all was because his daughter borrowed one of Mother's old dresses and that body in our silk on our mare was enough to get me up and ready just like that. Even that wasn't really enough to make it worth it though once her father started talking about the dirt. I was wishing I'd stayed back in my rooms and joined the boys in that girl I confiscated. I think the daughter was almost as bored as me because she just at there and stared off into the jungle and pointed her nipples at me while her father blathered. Maybe we could have both stayed and entertained each other. I definitely need to get a bit of her before they go, anyway. The golden hair is fine for cheap gratification and has to be laid to keep it from going into that famous human sex frenzy, but of course there's no comparing it to an actual womer. Anyway I would much rather have been back in my rooms with either one of them than out there listening to the mystic go on and on. I couldn't believe that Father actually put up with it but maybe he was just being – being –

We took the consultants out to see the drained hexes this afternoon. Well, to see the ground underneath, really, but it comes to the same thing in the end. Father spent a few days showing them around the plantation and explaining how we do things. He wanted to take them direct to the area we exposed, really, but the big one said that it was important that he have a general understanding of the 'context,' as he put it. Father asked me to come along to hear what they had to say so I did, but I'm really not sure that it did any good, because I understood very little of what the mer told us. Maybe that was because his daughter was sitting right beside me and I couldn't really think of much of anything besides the smell of her hair, the curve of her shoulders, and her disinterested, heavy-lidded eyes. She – I – no. There's no point in it. Move on. Even aside from – her – I don't think I would have really understood what her giant of a father was saying; it was all very mystical, very complex. He got down off his gelding when we reached the site, though it only put him a bit closer to the ground, and lowered his huge bare feet into the still moist yellow earth just inside the hex. He just – just - - -

- the hexagonal paddies spreading their white-walled web of angularity across the flat plane of our canopied jungle-cavern. He flexed his long golden toes in the pale, sickly yellow earth, heterochromic eyes slid shut and his head thrown back, braids dangling and shaking down his tawny-robed back to the level of his ankles. His nostrils flared, inhaling the humid air. We watched from our mounts atop the marble retaining wall above as he bent down to scoop out a handful of soil and formed it into a sticky ball in his broad palm, as those long fingers pushed and molded at the clay, testing its pliancy. He touched a bit of it gently to the tip of his tongue.

Father spoke up, a tinge of impatience in his voice. "What do you find, mer?"

The consultant shook his head slowly. "A moment more. I must test somewhat further." His daughter gave a soft sigh at my side.

The mer withdrew a twisted, withered amulet like a knotted black hide from the neck of his many-pocketed robes. He brought it to the wet ball of earth in his other hand, and as he did so the amulet's thick, withered sinews began to squirm and writhe, to twitch their way out of the knot. They wrapped themselves around the soil, encasing it in black strands. He stood for a few more moments in silence, eyes closed, just nodding his huge head slowly to some internal beat – and then withdrew his tool, folded automatically back up into its original configuration, and let the ball of earth drop back to the ground.

"As I expected," he said as he lifted himself back up onto the stone of the wall, "the problem is rather simple. You have too much birth."

"Too much birth?" Father said, puzzled. "I do not see how that is relevant in any way."

"Ah, of course," the mer went on, swinging back up onto his horse's broad black back, "I forget that knowledge of the Forces is not so common here as in Alinor. Allow me to explain. You see, both literally, symbolically, and metaphysically, soil is the womb of all things. It is the seat of nascence, of possibility and infinitude, for everything from plants to animals to man to mer to the patterns of history and myth. An extremely large array of possibilities is enmeshed together in the soil at any one time, and they are always developing, multiplying, and unfolding more fully into themselves. And when left alone, they are sundered and born from the soil in their own time, at a rate almost precisely equal to the rate of their development. One might argue that this separation in itself is a negative occurrence, but it is nevertheless necessary, at this point, to keep the soil alive; it must be refreshed by the deaths and seeds of its children to endure. Unfortunately, the presence of cleavage agents – men, primarily, though I am sad to say I must count many, many mer in the category as well – greatly increases the soil's birthrate, resulting in a rapid short term boost in fertility and, in the long term, to the loss of all productivity and the death of the soil."

Father fixed him with a flat stare, his narrow eyes displeased and frustrated. "Are you saying that we're simply producing too much?" he asked.

The mer's head shook briefly. "Not necessarily," he answered. "You do practice intense cultivation, as all of your people do in all aspects of life, but it is not nearly so intense as that to which we are accustomed. The problem is your management, the ratio of output to input, the fact that your people grow massive hedge-labyrinths of art and intellect with the material your Tower harvests, leave the native soil choked and jungle-barren with the draw of its roots, and do nothing to replenish the womb's complexity."

Father pursed his bronze lips pensively. "What would you suggest we do, then? We cannot tolerate any decrease in productivity."

The mer's wide mouth twisted wryly. "No one ever can, can they? The impulse to birth is inescapable."

His daughter gave a barely audible sniff of dissidence, her brow arched even higher than normal over her black eye. Her father seemingly ignored her, save for the shadow of a tolerant, flickering glance in her direction.

"There are many things you could do to help your soils," he went on. "Crop alteration and diversity. Prohibition of foot or equine traffic save in the most critical times and with the application of suitable compaction barriers. Sequestration of your slaves from influence on the earth. Cessation of irrigation. But given the amount and content of ideas your people are growing and the draw of White-Gold – I could feel it clearly even from here – I don't think any of it would be truly effective without an edaphomancer stationed her permanently."

Father's jaw dropped wider and wider with each suggestion. He stared at the big mer for a long, incredulous second as the braid-bound gold-skin finished.

"Are – you – serious?" he choked out. "I cannot do _any _of those things! Cease irrigating? Completely unfeasible!"

"I am quite serious," the mer replied gently, smiling down at Father, "and it is not so difficult as you would think. We have already developed prototype models in Alinor which operate based on those and other seemingly radical suggestions I might give you. They are quite productive."

"But – but _why _should I do these things?" Father spluttered out. "So much trouble it would be – and for what? Irrigation is what makes our yield possible! Why would I ever stop?"

The mer shrugged again. "Irrigation is perhaps the biggest problem you could actually remedy," he dropped easily. "Your paddies both feed from and drain into the river, do they not? The river is saturated with all manner of substances, forces, and ideas; flooding your hexes with its waters inundates your soil with all of that morass – most of which is helpful, true, but only in small doses. It improves your yield by saturating your fields with ideas and transient interrelationships, but the overwhelming rush of it poisons the soil itself, which is what sustains prolonged production. Further, as it drains back into the river it carries with it bits of your weakened soil; by irrigating, you willfully erode away your land."

A few moments of silent struggle as Father digested the mer's words. There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask about what he had just said, but I held my tongue out of respect for Father.

"Isn't there anything _else _we could do?" he managed at last.

Again the little shrug of those broad shoulders, like the apologetic reflex of a mer who has already said all he can say.

"You could train an edaphomancer, as I said," he answered, "because the only thing that will really help here is understanding, and, frankly speaking, you have little of that. Your soil is one of a peculiar sort, by virtue of the way your architects managed the cosminach project up north. Most soils have a distinct character of their own that influences their functionality, and this does as well – but in a different sense. Almost all conception has been drawn out of the earth here to fuel your Tower's basic arcana and the innumerable fancies of your people, leaving it blank, empty; a chameleon slate that approximates the conception of whatever bit of creatia happens to be nearby and gives birth anew to the same or similar patterns. You could use that characteristic to salvage the soil, actually – try to spread a little love about – but not with great reliability, lacking an edaphomancer who has been taught the memory of understanding."

"How… would we go about that?" Father asked, eyes widened and overwhelmed. "I… am afraid that you are correct when you say that I have very little understanding, because I don't have any idea what you just said."

The mer smiled gently down at us, and clapped my father's silk-robed shoulder with one large hand. "I do not expect you to," he said. "Comprehending the entanglement of any system is never easy, but least so with soils. It takes some time to become familiar with the basic concepts involved, and of course no one ever really _understands. _I will explain more by and by. For now, let us return to your halls. I think me the time for a meal approaches."

He turned his gelding back down the marble causeway and heeled its glossy sides with his bare feet. Beside me, his daughter jumped suddenly into motion, swinging her mare around after him and slowing to a walk when she reached his side. Father gave me an exhausted, exasperated look.

"I don't know," he sighed. "I just don't know, ! -[]$. He's supposedly the best, but –" He stopped helplessly, shrugging his shoulders.

"His words have the ring of knowledge," I replied quietly.

"Perhaps," Father answered. "Perhaps." We sat our horses in silence, watching the two consultants ride away into the humid emerald murk, two figures in tawny, pocketed robes and bare feet, with red-gold hair beaded in innumerable tiny plaits, the mer huge and looming but in no way ungainly, and she, _she_… riding sidesaddle across my best mare's sheening black back, golden fingers twined through her freshly brushed mane as she leaned over my girl's arched neck to breathe in her ear… even looking back on it brings a tremor to my heart's beat, a quaver to my fingertips.

I spoke up softly, hesitantly, my heart in my mouth with the import I knew would be lost on my father.

"Might I… ask them some questions?"

Father frowned contemplatively, then nodded. "Yes, do. I wasn't given an intelligent son – I wasn't given an intelligent son – I wasn't given an intelligent s- so – son - - - for nothing. Go see what you can learn."

And – and – and I did – NOT! I asked – I listened – I ignored – and he told me of the uses of love and curiousity as tonics for ailing complexity – some strange words – nonsense, spouted – of the tests he had used to determine the texture of myth – the color of birth – the taste of bull shit – and of the incredible fragility of earth – of dirty, mannish mysticism and weakness. And all the while most of my mind was really on _her, _on – her hips – the way my rocketing curiousity struck her – her thighs – whether she thought I caught the concepts quickly – the curve of her soft upper arm – on how often she glanced at me, on whether she would speak – her nipples through Mother's thin dress – on the frustrating agony of being so close to her, of the disconnect of being simultaneously so internally mobilized and so externally functional and competent – on how her throat would taste – on what those sultry eyes would look like rolled back up into her head with my touch. All the terrible tempest of emotion – of lust – I had held in check as her father spoke earlier broke loose in my head – in my loins – as soon as I relinquished my shield of silence and made myself an active part of the conversation, something she could respond - - - to, something she could evaluate and judge. And though I kept my head in check that whole ride home and asked all the questions I should have, responded with all the curious musings I could muster, I have no idea now what was said. It is gone, buried under – her hips – her cool, unresponsive eyes, her silence, her indifference to all I could do. It is there still, I know, and I will find it when I can, but now, now all I can do is shudder with the fullness that is any prolonged thought of _her, _shudder and seek solace in my workroom's depths, just as I fled to my chambers after our return to find that surprisingly kind and gentle golden hair waiting to comfort me with her soft, happy smile at – my – return - - with her uncertain glance and a long bath – with her slutty – little – sl – I - - - - T - - - - -


	13. Chapter 12

**AN: Dickens? Why, you flatterer you. :p  
**

**Chapter XII**

"Well, good sir, what do you think the old beak noses have planned for us tonight?"

"Why, it is quite obvious, my dear fellow; nothing less than a full, unabridged auditory compendium of all the things we may not consume, and in full Altmeri character it shall be both preponderous and ridiculously obtuse. It shall begin with the apparel prohibitions, because of course the elves will feel the need to point out to us that it is not, in fact, healthy to dine on the insoles of maiden dancers' shoes or to roast and season the brim of grandfathers' old hat, the latter being also disrespectful to the poor blighter's incorporeal fashion sensibilities. From there we shall move on to the seventy-three unacceptable minerals, the eighty-five forbidden forms of feces, the 320 toxic polymers, and the 983 impolite classes of cannibalism. By the end of the evening the epidemic of consumptive prohibition will have traversed all realms animal, vegetable, mineral, and spiritual, and we may just barely have time to move on and cover the conceptual before we are released to scavenge the tables for the unprecedented coexistence of palatability and permissibility. _Not _that we shall be hungry at that point, naturally; I dare say we shall be quite _full up._"

Miles tossed his head back on his quilted parallelogram of a bed, laughing fit to split his ribs as I grinned back at him in the cracked and splintered mirror and wrapped up my speculative monologue. I was nearly dressed at that point, as I recall; just finishing up the last knots of my formal robes' cravat.

"Oh, sink me, but I daresay you've hit quite pinned it with that one, good sir," the Imperial said through chuckling coughs as he recovered himself and sat up straight once more. "We shall be positively stuffed full with their puffed-up formality; Odfrin'll be using you as a pincushion by the time the night is done!"

"My - dear - fellow!" I exclaimed in mock indignation, fixing him with an affronted stare in the scuffed mirror. "My dear _fellow!_ A _pincushion? _I really must object. One such as myself could be nothing less than the finest, plushest byssus body pillow for my lady's late night comforts. A pincushion! _Really, _sir!"

That was how it started, that evening; in bandied words and cheek-tongued levity. I'd almost forgotten. I'd almost forgotten that there had ever been cheer for us in Alinor, to tell the truth; but there was, there was. There was laughter and jest, teasing and debate, light-hearted merriment and heart-to-heart confidences, the simple surety of friendship and the uncertain falterings of deepening interest. There were the long walks together through the bewildering impossibility of the infinitely layered and interwoven cityscape, filled more often with our coping mockery and comedy than with true investigation; more common to find us ridiculing and mimicking the elves than to find us questioning them. There was the communal kitchen, the hours and hours cramped happily together in that tiny crack of a cooking space, yelling and laughing and singing as we bound ourselves tighter and tighter together with the exclusivity of our food, obliviously duplicating the elven phenomenon; Ildonis sweating and huff huff huffing with the pant of the sear-crystal stove, his round face rosy and shining as he flipped his Colovian potato pancakes or seared a chain of boar sausage; little Ciene perched up near the crown of his sweat-slicked golden head on a splintered pine cabinet, rolling and folding and criss-crossing her native High Rock pastries, roasting them to flaky heaven on the belches of her chained atronach's struggling grunts; Tsabhi working her magic with cream and sugar into replicas of Cyrodiil so fantastic as to home-ache our hearts even in the warmth of our entangled community; I the madly shredding, stirring, pureeing, chopping, sprinkling and measuring sous chef to Alusan's masterful planning and direction; Miles in the chilled pantry beyond, humming happily over his brewing beers, meads, and traditional Nibenean yogurts; and Odfrin woven through it all, though she but sat, quiet and content to watch us her people, kicking her toes in the air from her designated bit of counter space but her invisible hands everywhere at once, bringing us all just what we needed for the next step and clearing away our messes as soon as they were made, stroking and patting our hair and cheeks in her soft, cherishing way, simply content with our mere presence. There were the long nights with all of us together in the dim ochre gloom of the Embassy's multifaceted main chamber, cuddled and snuggled and cozied together into each other and into our seats, staring down into the enchanted flames within the latticed pillar-place and sipping hot black brew from Odfrin's samovar. There were bleary mornings and stepwise awakenings to the sweaty, rumpled awareness of my heart's companions sprawled slumbering and snoring across the room in all their natural, unartificed beauty; Ildonis a huge mound on the floor, his belly patterned in his Khajiiti angle-spun blanket and pillowing Ciene's head and half-bared shoulders as she lay curled half on and half off the divan beside him; Tsabhi's eyes pressed down into tight black slits in stubborn sleep and just barely protruding above the edge of her nest of blankets, rugs, and pillows, her tail twitching and lashing with dreams; Alusan snoring in Ildonis' usual enormous throne looking like an ebony statue, hands clasped on the battered arms, blankets bunched about his bare torso, head kept stiff and straight by his pouf of wiry black hair, mouth a dark, seriously sensual line; one bare, hairy foot dangling over the edge of a checkerboard-patterned papasan the only evidence of Miles; Odfrin blinking foggy winter dawn at me through her sleep-skeined curl-curtains; watching her wake from inches away on the shared divan, warm and immobile in comfort and in the imagining of what I must have looked like to her; dipping back into ease-steeped dozes with her fingers just barely touching my side.

Warmth. Warmth and cheer. Yes, there were both, then. I would do well to remember it. I would do well to remember that, by our love, my time in Alinor was nowhere near so horrible as it has seemed since I was forced to leave my Odfrin and the rest. I must remember that we were a community bound in love so strong that even in this land of alienation we were able to keep one another safe and – and happy. That we were tied so closely into each other that that night just three weeks after our arrival, when the Thalmor notified us that we would be attending a dinner – more the way one might inform a show-pony that she would be performing next evening but one than the way one would invite esteemed ambassadors to their first formal gathering in one's land – not all their considerable powers of insult and alienation could truly dampen our spirits. That we were so much in love that we could do nothing more than fall more so for each other under their eyes, come closer to one another's hearts, take steps we had not yet dared… such was the power of our contiguity; that it was utterly impervious to mer. No doubt we seemed as cold and insular to them as they did to us – we neither realized nor cared a single whit what they thought of our integration. We were in love.

Ah… that night. _Gods, _that night. Mara be praised. I hadn't – hadn't thought of it in so long, but today was so full of brightness and hope that it just – just reached out and snagged my heart so hard that I gasped and cried at the immediacy of the memory. And even now it clamors to be touched, rubbed, fondled in all its intricate chronoculic crannies, as though the moment itself literally reaches out to me across time. And I cannot deny it.

"Oy, are you two decent in there?" came Ciene's piping voice after a sudden brisk burst of raps on our spider-cracked door. The handle rattled and her head popped in on us without waiting for an answer, looking impishly around with a façade of excited lechery.

"Avaunt, dear lady!" Miles burst out, throwing himself backward and tumbling off the edge of the bed, where he could not be seen. "'Tis not safe in these chambers for such as thee! Here be one-eyed wyrms!"

"Oh pish posh on that you hoot, I don't give two shakes of my tail for one-eyed wyrms," she said happily, sticking her tongue out at the Imperial's head peeping playfully over the edge of the bed as she stepped smartly into the room.

"The lady has a courage forged from the finest steel," Miles marveled. "Truly of steel, to face the wyrm without cringe or shudder for its touch. A model for us all."

"Who said anything about touch?" the Breton answered. "I'm just here to look. Although," her brown eyes swept slowly up my body, "_well, _I _might _reconsider. This one's looking good, he is."

"Thank you kindly, lady," I chirped with a broad grin as I tucked the last fold of my cravat into my collar. "I do what I can."

"Indeed you do," she mused, still eyeing my fitted, high-collared, starlight-sheening silk robes and magnus-embroidered eye patch with approval. "Who are _you _out to impress?"

Miles coughed loudly. "Ahem. Stupid question sighted."

I smiled down at her with a wink, chucking her lightly under her dainty little chin. "Who says I'm not out to impress _you, _eh, little one? You're looking quite enticing yourself."

The pale cheeks bloomed pink. She looked down, biting her underlip.

"Oh, you're ridiculous," she muttered, suddenly shy. "Just hurry up, will you? It's time to _go!_" And she rushed back out from our room, leaving the door slightly ajar in her wake.

"Well that was unexpected," Miles muttered more seriously as he pushed himself back to his feet and brushed his emerald robes smooth again. "Maybe she has the spring time fever for you, Jon. She _was _looking good."

"I doubt it," I answered. "Maybe, but I doubt it. Something tells me that Ciene's attention is somewhere else entirely." I didn't know where she had bestowed it, but I would have been very surprised indeed if that helmet of brown hair had been made to shine like polished teak for my sake, if she had painted violet stars and outlines on her thin skin to make me want to fall into those dark eyes accented to mesmerizing in her tiny, done-up face, to make me wonder what those half-open pink lips would taste like, if the clinging cut of her scarlet satin dress-robe was designed to put _my _mind on her pert breasts and slim hips.

"Well, whatever you say," Miles answered with a shrug, running a hand through his coppery hair and leaving it in a casual tousle. "You're the one who understands women."

I shrugged offhandedly. "Hardly. It's just my guess. Just something about her tells me she's got her eye set elsewhere."

"Maybe it's set on _me, _then, eh?" the Imperial laughed, winking and jogging my side with an elbow as we stepped toward the door. "What say you, good sir? Think you I should attempt a cozy with yon Breton lady this evening?" He peered down at me along a thin, freckled nose lifted exaggeratedly high in the air.

"My dear fellow," I answered, slipping back into my best Altmeri accent, "it does not do to discuss such prospects when the event itself looms so imminent. A man's anxiety never fails but to spoil his chances at a lady's cuddle-charms; remember that, now, remember that. And claptrap your tongue now, dear fellow; we must to be off!" I stepped smartly out of the room, pulling a chuckling Miles after.

"Well look at that Alusan, we've got two more!" Ildonis' big voice boomed out over us as we made our way down the ochre crystal chamber's steps and to the sunken central ring, where the massive dawn-blonde Colovian sat magisterial in his dilapidated throne, austere oak-veined robes draping his bulk in refined, stoic majesty. Alusan leaned whip-thin and sleek in his blinding white trench coat against one wing of the chair.

"What, have you been waiting for us?" I asked as I drew to a halt before them.

"Only for a little less than half an hour!" Ildonis answered mock-grimly, wagging one fat finger under my nose. "Even Ciene and Tsabhi were ready before you!"

"Did you give her an eyeful, or something?" Alusan slid in curiously. "She jumped out of your room like a mantis on a griddle, pink as a pumpkin, and made Tsabhi go with her to help Odfrin finish getting dressed."

"I can provide neither confirmation nor denial of the possibility that Miles dazzled her with his body's blinding radiance," I answered, straight-faced.

The Imperial nearly choked. "What? You story-telling rumor-mongreling old sod, it was you what lit the blush fire under her bum! Don't even try to pin that on me!"

"I did nothing of the sort," I answered, twisting my brow affrontedly. "Can you believe that this fellow even attempts such blatant deceptions, gentlemen? It is quite ridiculous." I lowered my voice to a low rumble. "After all, it should be quite obvious to you all by now that there is only one bum around here under which I would wish to light a blush-fire."

"Oh, we know," Alusan answered wryly as Ildonis split his grave play-mask with his wide pink grin and high giggle. "We're not blind, or even half so."

"And, Dibella's praise, but you'll wish you weren't tonight, Jon," Miles said lowly, jumping abruptly out of his exaggerated personality and nudging my arm gently. "Just turn around and see."

"Oh pshaw on that," I answered obliviously as I turned, not catching his tone, "having one eye just makes sight all the more – " I cut off as I completed the turn and saw what the rest had already seen.

The girls stood there, waiting to be noticed on the cracked crystal steps; Ciene in her clinging scarlet satin, tiny and delicate and impishly fresh; Tsabhi in sheer grey silk like an immensely long scarf wrapped tight about her torso, accenting her breasts and falling down to her furred toes in voluminous loops, its neutral tone bringing out the white stripes and markings of her mostly black-furred face; and Odfrin between them, clasping their hands gently in her own, smiling shyly down at us – at me – with those pale, crystalline blue eyes, her tangled frizz somehow smoothed and silked down into a sculpted bun, trailing ringlets around her face and down her neck, her lush, milky body draped in a simple sleeve of creamy butter muslin that left bare her round, blushing arms.

"Oh."

"Hello there," the Nord said softly, stepping forward and bringing Tsabhi and Ciene with her. She bit her underlip coyly as I closed my mouth.

"Good evening, fair enchantresses," Miles put in smoothly, cutting a graceful bow before the three. "My comrades and I are most blessed to be accompanied by such lovely ladies as you. Truly, we are unworthy of your splendor." He drew the back of a bold hand down Ciene's pink cheek.

"This one disagrees," Tsabhi purred languidly, casting half-closed eyes over Alusan's handsome, narrow figure. "You males have come finely prepared as well." Alusan blinked dumbly, then eased a slow, lopsided grin, flashing white teeth against his dark skin, and tossed the Khajiit a dashing wink.

"I agree," Odfrin murmured, stepping forward and releasing Ciene's hand to run a lingering finger across my shoulder, ostensibly smoothing out a crease in the black silk. My face quickly began to heat, and she smiled more widely as she stepped away. Behind her, Ciene frowned down at her toes, rubbing her arm awkwardly as Miles whispered in her ear.

"Oh good gods," grumbled Ildonis as he pushed his towering bulk to his huge feet," I don't even want to know what this is going to look like once the wine starts flowing. At least hold yourselves in until we get back, will you? The Thalmor will probably die of apoplexy if any of you start going south in public."

"Oh, don't you feel left out," Odfrin said sweetly, twining her telekinetic hand through his pale hair and rubbing one large pink cheek with it. "I'm sure one of us wouldn't mind being shared, right girls?" She looked around expectantly. Tsabhi's eyes had gone all squinty, though, in uncertainty, and little Ciene's looked as though they might pop at the very thought. I traded embarrassed, awkward looks with Alusan and Miles; we all loved Odfrin, but she sometimes had some strange ideas about human nature and how far she could push that sort of levity-layered seriousness.

"Much appreciated, my love," Ildonis replied smoothly after a moment's startled pause, "but I must decline. You're all as beautiful as they come, but I need a woman of proper size."

"None of those around here, I'm afraid," Alusan said. "Only one's around her tall enough for your taste are elves."

"Quite," the blond Imperial answered with a nod. "And, if you will pardon the expression's juxtapositive sense in this context, I am not about to stoop to that."

"Who would?" asked Odfrin vehemently as a chuckle ran around the room. "I'll tell you right now that I was perfectly happy to wait for a _man _to come rather than take on one of these girlish High Elven he-shes," she said, sliding a look at me out of the corner of her eye with a small smile. "There's _nothing _like a good man, when you're –"

"Are we going to _go," _exclaimed Ciene abruptly, throwing her little hands in the air, "or just stand around forever being sordid? _Mmm?_"

"Right," Miles took on briskly, "she's right. If we _must _do this, we had better get to it."

"_Must _we, though?" I put in. "To be both serious and honest, I'm not particularly keen on a night of Thalmor arrogance and ignorance when we could entertain ourselves to perfect contentment right here."

Odfrin answered. "It is necessary, unfortunately. The Thalmor always require us to attend these formals, though I really don't know _why. _It's no doubt as much of an imposition on them and their noble guests as it is on us."

"Who knows why the Thalmor do anything?" Ildonis said, shrugging.

"No one," muttered Miles. "They are unknowable."

"Well, now that's going a little far," I hedged, frowning. "No one is _unknowable._ I care for the way they have treated us as little as you, but we have to try to keep an open mind toward them, or we're no better than are they. I must say I feel almost sorry for –"

"Oooh, you bunch of puffed-up old peacocks!" The shrill voice cut through my lecture. Ciene stamped a tiny slippered foot in frustration. "Can we _go, _already?"

"We're going, we're going!" Ildonis laughed. "Gods, what an impatient little thing you are! Come on, you lot, move along now. Before Ciene bursts."

The big man waved us chucklingly along toward the room's high, splinter-crack of a door with one pink paw. I turned to Ciene with an embarrassed smile as the rest of the group shuffled, laughing, on out the door.

"My apologies, my dear," I said, bowing before her and lifting her delicate pale hand gently to my lips. "I suppose I really _am _a bit of a prune and an airhead, when it comes down to it. I am sorry for having frustrated you."

"Oh – well – it wasn't really – I mean, not a fault in you, Jon, so much as – " she spluttered along falteringly, blinking and blushing up at me. "It wasn't even so much – _you _as – as – oh, forget it. I'm just being irritable and over-reactive."

"Impossible," I stated stoutly. "The lady is never anything but justified in her opinions. If you have found me tiresome, it is most likely because I have been tiresome, plainly and simply."

"Oh, stop it, you great prune," she giggled, wrinkling her nose up at me. "Just give me a hug and let's move on with this night."

"As the lady commands," I replied with a wink, and bent down to let her wrap her thin arms around my neck as I pressed my hand to the satin in the small of her back. Her chin pressed comfortably down on my shoulder.

"We'd better hurry up now, or they'll make fun of _me _for detaining us," she said in a strangely timid voice as we separated and I straightened up. "Enjoy the evening, Jon." And she rushed past me, legs swishing swiftly in their scarlet satin as she slipped outside. I frowned in puzzlement for a moment – why the sudden shift in manner? – but then decided it would have to await later consideration, and turned on my heel toward the exit.

Odfrin was waiting for me, leaning in her lush, casually rondelet way against the scuffed doorjamb with her bare arms dangling at her sides, watching me with wide, curious blue eyes.

"Did you make it up with her?" she asked quietly as I climbed the room's ochre steps. "She seemed a little… upset."

"She did," I agreed lowly. "I don't know what's bothering her, precisely, but I did what I could; if it's over something _I _did, anyway. She still seemed a bit out of sorts, though."

"Mmm," Odfrin mused, pressing her lips together thoughtfully. "Maybe it's a woman thing," she said. "I'll have to talk to her about it, if she keeps on. Don't let me forget."

"Of course not," I answered. She pushed away from the doorjamb with a mischievous little smile and stepped out onto the high steps of the Embassy's stoop.

"And don't you forget to not let me forget," she admonished playfully as I followed and pulled the high door shut behind me with a click. "Because, as with the remembrances of remembrances, I know forgetfulness about wariness for forgetfulness is one of those traps into which you men love to oh-so-conveniently fall."

"I don't know what you mean," I replied blithely, accompanying the Nord down the steps toward the waiting leopard lines of the Thalmori carriages where they sat in the narrow alley's shadowed strait. I laid one hand in the gathered folds of cloth against the small of her back and leaned down to speak near her ear, deepening my voice. "But I do know that the way you look tonight is enough to make a man forget his own name, along with any responsibility or sense of… restraint that he might be better to remember."

Her milky arms pebbled with goose prickles. I allowed myself a small grin in satisfaction as I guided her forward and handed her in to the carriage's low, gloomy depths. There was just one that night, waiting for us there in the Embassy's grey, ravine-head alley; Aatheril and his cronies, it seemed, had not thought it necessary to see us out of our sanctuary. I cast one last look around at the empty, wind-whistling street before joining my comrades. The sky was but a strip of jagged black obsidian high above, cramped and clawed by the city's converging talon-tower's. The pillars of the Altmeri aroma absorbant towered to either side of the Embassy's unmarked entrance like garbage bins by the back entrance of a brothel. Gods, but they put us in about the worst part of the city that they possibly could; dark, empty, forgotten, dilapidated, perhaps condemned for any use by Altmer, like a slum sans the scum of society – because I doubt that the Altmer allow the scum of their society to live. Or perhaps the scum of Altmeri society do not allow _themselves _to live; it seems conceivable. Regardless, I never did see in Alinor anything resembling a beggar or a diseased pauper, despite the Embassy's poor district.

A whip cracked above me; the lounging slump of the black-clad driver announcing in his oblique elven way that I should quit wasting time and get in the carriage like a good little human. He did not, of course, look at me, or make any sign that he realized he had passengers at all, but I took his meaning nonetheless. I stooped down and let the carriage's gloom engulf me. The hatch clicked shut at my back.

"There he is," Miles' voice murmured through the gloom as I adjusted my position on the sling-seat Odfrin's moon-glowing arm pulled me down to share. "We were beginning to think you'd leave us bare and bereft without an interpreter, at the mercy of the elves for an entire evening."

I chuckled, shaking my head as I settled my arm around Odfrin's hip and pulled her closer to my side. "Oh, Miles, you know I would never do that to you. I must say that I'm not sure how much of a difference it would make if I did, though; you know how very uninclined any elves except the Thalmor are to speak with us, regardless of language."

"Not that the Thalmor are _inclined _to do it either, of course," Ildonis rumbled out from behind.

"Of course," I added. "Naturally to speak with any of us is quite embarrassing, to a High Elf." The carriage lurched into motion, swaying us all on our slings. "They think so _highly _of themselves, you know? That they are forced to endure their inferiors in their capitol because they could not conquer us in war must be a terribly difficult-to-take embarrassment."

Odfrin snorted loudly, making me jump. Her hand patted my wrist lightly. "Oh, Jon, you are a dear for trying, but better just to face the facts and admit that elves are just prissy little bitches, plain and simple."

The carriage's gloom rumbled with laughter. 'Hear, hear!" Miles exclaimed. "Well said, my lady, well said."

I shrugged helplessly, unable to suppress a growing smile. "I must try, mustn't I?" I said. "Surely there's more to them than just that."

Ciene shook her head at me with an indulgent, cautious little smile from under Miles' arm.

"If they were human or beastfolk there would be more to them than that, Jon," Odfrin replied gently, "but they're not. They're elves who can't even reconcile themselves to _living. _Which, in Skyrim, we call being prissy little bitches. Everyone else on our Nirn _tries, _at least _tries _to get along and make the best of this life, to enjoy it when they can – but not the elves. They do nothing but brood over how awful everything is; all their thousand year lifespans amount to is 'stoic endurance,' which is just an elven way of saying 'whining without whining.'" She held a finger up against my lips as I opened my mouth to speak. "I have compassion for anyone who at least tries to cope, Jon, as I have compassion for those elves who fall outside the norms of their race. But the fact is that most elves do _not _try. And that I do not understand. I find it pathetic."

"It _is _pathetic," Ciene agreed vehemently. "They do nothing in this world save ruin it for others. Look at what they did to us when we got here. Look at this city. They kill joy with every touch."

"Well that's hardly fair," I replied, frowning. "You can't say that the Altmer have never contributed anything; much of the Empire and our culture is modeled on the example of the ancient elves. They gave us almost all of our magical advances; our College's predecessor, the Mages' Guild, was originally an Altmeri institution. Their arrogance, tiresome as it is, is almost understandable in light of the fact that their advancements enabled humanity's rise. How can you say that they did not try?"

Miles grated a dark laugh. "Enabled. Is that what you call the slavery of our people, then, Jon? Elven culture and magic only 'enabled' us after we had enabled ourselves by inventing freedom."

"This one agrees," Tsabhi purred quietly in response. "Elven developments – even those of the Dwemer – only become actual advancements once they are acquired by and adapted to the uses of man and beast."

Odfrin continued on as the Khajiit trailed off, leaving me not the slightest opportunity for a counter-argument. "Tsabhi's right, Jon, and she's right because of the _motivation _of elven activity. Men and beasts act because they wish to help the world become itself more fully; elves act because they wish to make it something else entirely."

"And is that so bad?" I asked quietly, a bit overwhelmed by my opposition. "Is it really something we can condemn them for?"

"It is, Jon. Because, believe me, you won't like what the elves want to make of the world."

I held her pale, serious eyes for a long moment, then nodded admittance with a subdued frown. 'I know, I know," I said. "I have seen the same Alinor as the rest of you, and been repulsed just as strongly. I just – there's so much potential for good here, you know? Look at what they've accomplished! They could do so much for the Empire, for all of us, if they could just be convinced to see the world differently. And maybe if we can understand them, we can get _them _to understand _us, _and how we view the world."

"Oh, Jon," Odfrin sighed, laying her head softly on my arm, "you poor thing. It can't be done, and we're not here to try. All we're here to do is to try to understand some of their magic and technology and bring it back to humanity, to be put to some real use. That is our purpose."

"Exactly," Alusan affirmed gravely, frowning at me through the murk. "And remember it, Urfe. You should never have forgotten. You know the nature of comprehension better than any of us; you know what could happen to you if you actually began to understand them." And indeed I did. "Do not risk it."

The unusual harshness of his deep voice seemed to echo in the silence after, as it echoed in my mind for much longer than just that evening. I knew he was right – I know he _is _right – for comprehension is a becoming. But the instinct to make the attempt was very difficult to repress… and is becoming so once more.

"My apologies, again," I said after a moment. "I forgot myself. We will not discuss it again." No one spoke. Odfrin's hand crept into mine, though; a comforting warmth. It was enough. We remained quiet most of the rest of the ride, each of us lost in our own musings, our solidarity momentarily fractured by my simple blunder of an attempt to include elves in the mix. Ah, I should have known better; particularly I should have known not to go so far with the 'enablement' line. The days of slavery for Miles' people are thousands of years gone and their enslaving elves, the Ayleids, long gone with them, but Nibenean memories are long with the moth talk of their ancestors, and Miles has always been sensitive of the topic. His continued brooding moodiness kept all of us silent out of deference, I think. I squeezed Odfrin tighter to my side, and turned my attention to the jagged window slit, watching the strange city slip past.

Journeys through Alinor urban were always odd experiences, regardless of the mode of transportation. For one thing, it was quite impossible to estimate how long an expedition might take; the same path to the same destination that took but fifteen minutes one day might take three hours the next, without any discernible change in its physical distance. Even within the Embassy, movement was not reliable; some days it seemed that our main chamber was three strides across; others it was as vast as a ballroom. We could at least rely on the Embassy and its confines not to move around on us, though – the same could not be said for the rest of the city; the destinations of doors, gates, and entire streets changed from week to week, day to day, sometimes even moment to moment, making any directed exploration fairly pointless. Even at the best of times, though, the place's translations were impossible as we would normally view it; straight towers spiraled; trapdoors in floors opened into walls; stairs slanted up led down; windows looked out on the opposite side of buildings from that in which they were set. It was not uncommon to see a bridge spanning a gap wrongside up, its users completely oblivious and walking along with their heads pointing at the ground as though it was not unusual in the slightest. It was as though the place's sense of space – and maybe time – was not one clean, tidy piece of fabric the way it is throughout most of Tamriel, but rather an interwoven ball where warp and woof had no meaning, where the threads of the matrix tangled impossibly in on one another, wrapping tight together and spiraling in on some central skeining core. Ciene had studied spatial mutations of the kind before as part of her advanced work in planar mechanics, and she could pretty well navigate her way through the city, as could Alusan, though with nowhere near the speed of an elf, but the only place the rest of us could find with any consistency was the Embassy itself. That was why Odfrin would not let us leave, that first day; we had not bonded with the place enough to be able to find our way back to it, through the city's interwoven matrix. We would have been lost and starved out in some straight-curved elven alleyway had we not taken her advice.

But there was an overarching feeling that went along with travel in the city, too; something out of sync about it, something dissonant beyond its obvious impossibilities of space, as though what one saw and what one did had no real bearing on where one was and which way one went. Partially it was the bizarre spatiality at work, of course. Certainly the jolt of walking a straight bridge for some time and then looking back to find that it was instead a spiraling ramp, or the shock of the first time one used one of the octagonally gravitated spokeways were unsettling enough, but at times the feeling seemed to stem from something beyond even that. It was a nagging uncertainty that built in the echoes of one's own footsteps and in the corner's of one's witchsight, a niggling doubt in one's own navigation like a tiny persistent voice whispering from the shining, parallel-non-parallel walls; _Where are you going? You should have turned left before. I don't think you're going where you think you're going. _If I am honest with myself, it felt much as though the city itself whispered subliminally in my mind and my heart, seeding elven heresies and despairs. And perhaps it did.

That night's ride was no different. I sat there, Odfrin warm and soft against my side, her head on my shoulder and my hand on her hip, and watched as the city flashed past me from a thousand different angles. We slid along for some time between the cramped walls of the Embassy's alley, which I would swear is usually near the bottom of the city, and then suddenly we shot out onto a broad bridge spanning a thousand foot drop to an inlet of the bay between two night-gleaming spire monoliths, the waters below oily with the reflected incandescence of the city's innumerable lurid lights. A curving turn, and we flashed through a triangled gate and into a low tunnel with walls like cut diamonds and door after mirrored door reflecting the carriage's leopard slink, like the glassy eyes of Julianos' Madgod Resistance Ward. Out the other side we flew, the horses' hooves sparking fairy lights on the iridescent stones, and around an enormous fountain whose ever shifting jets crossed and converged to count out infinity series in air and water; the city all above us once more, the setting sun cramped and crunched between the city's brutally oversaturated claws even though it had been quite dark when we left. We shattered a hanging curtain of sunset-golden aquatic numerals, and found ourselves circling high, high above most of the city along a thin rim of track supported on lace-lattice flared like a lady's fan above everything, and the skies were black and prickling anew – and below us shines the city, high, sharp, glittering, patched in violet and violent amber, in night's birth and day's death as the sun's setting reached each section of the strange city differentially. On and on like that it went, from high to low to in to out to upside down to rightside up to inside out, to night to day to night and back until our human minds could take the uncertainty of place and time no more, and we withdrew our eyes from the slit-windows with almost perfect simultaneity.

"By the Eight and One, but I hate this city," Miles muttered softly in the dark. "It's enough to put you off your dinner."

"I'm still not clear on how the place is even _possible,_" I said. "I mean, I know the College's architects tinker the fundamental matrix around Miscarcand to produce something of the same effect and prevent unwanted intruders, but that's only on a very limited scale and with extremities of inputs. How do they manage to do it for an entire city? Do either of you know, Ciene, Alusan?"

The Redguard just shrugged his shoulders, a headless pale sheet in the dark, but Ciene answered cautiously.

"I'm not really sure. The effect is so widespread… by conventional techniques you'd need a power source of an enormous capacity… and I've felt nothing of the kind; I'm sure none of you have, either. And it's so unstructured, so random… it almost seems unintentional. Like it's a side-effect of something else. Don't ask me of what, though."

"Of their stagnant becoming," a quiet voice whispered suddenly from near my ear, drifting breathily through the carriage. "Of their eternal endeavor. Of locks and chains. Of stifled possibility. Of frozen flow. Of oppressive proximity." Odfrin's pale eyes glowed through the gloom, wide and empty and distant as the stars. "Of webs and wombs."

Eleven eyes turned to peer toward the Nord, in hushed curiousity. She gave no response, gaze still fixed on something beyond the visible. Her hand in mine had gone nearly as icy as her eyes.

I spoke softly, looking down on the golden head pillowed against my shoulder. "You have been here longer than we, Odfrin. Do you know something?"

"Know something?" she murmured, tilting her head to meet my eye. "No, Jon, I do not know something. But I feel the spectres of spectra in my bones. The elves have done… something. Are doing – something. All the time – or – all the _un_time. And it is terrible. Unnatural."

Her words held the gloom through a long moment of silence, as her eyes held mine in their frozen thrall. Then their corners crinkled abruptly, and her lips pressed wide in a smile.

"But enough of _that_ sort of nonsense thought," she said, flicking the invisible insect of the moment off her wrist in distaste. "_That's_ best left for safety and security in the amber nest, not out here in the open. _You never know how they'll bind you. _It's a party night, right? We should enjoy each other! We are here together, after all. It's time for revelry!"

"Ah, Odfrin," I sighed, leaning down to press a kiss to the top of her head as Ildonis' chuckles rumbled warmly through the carriage, "that it is. And that we are. We are here with you."


	14. Chapter 13

**Chapter XIII**

They brought us in through the loading dock. Yes; the carriage slowed, the click of the horses' hooves halted, the hatch sprang open, we readied ourselves for visions of overwhelming chromatic splendor and overdone artificery, for a palace built of spliced rainbows and moonbeams, with steps shimmering like the auroras of night, for two dimensional statues of Altmeri heroes sculpted in mirror-clay – and found instead a rather nondescript ramped bank of grey metal and a huge dark gap where the contents of six enormous yellow wagons like flower pods were being quite hurriedly unloaded.

We piled cautiously out of the carriage, peering around uncertainly. The place swarmed with identically tall, slim, and sharp-faced elves in crisp, clean outfits of periwinkle byssus that left bare a narrow 'v' of their hairless golden chests, with loud, knocking shoes shaped like splinters of glass. They made a dreadful racket clattering about with their sharp heels and clicking their pointed toes against the riveted metal platform as they streamed in and out around the garish yellow wagons, their thin arms filled with aromatic wooden crates the color of raw ebony, or draped in layers of sea-silk to cushion delicate crystalline crockery, or empty and slicing the air sharply at their sides as they marched their noisy march about the dock. None of them seemed to be paying the slightest bit of attention to any of the others. The air was choked in digits; their clear elven voices pealed out a continued conglomerating string of numbers, as though counting continually down to some deadline.

I turned to the slumped black form that was our driver in his low seat as the rest of the group huddled together uncertainly. "Excuse me, sir," I said politely in Altmeris, "but are you _quite _sure this is where –" One bony golden hand reached up to adjust his slanted hat from one side to the other, so that the elf's face was completely obscured from my sight, and I from his. Then his whip popped a crackle of sparks above his horses' dark, narrow hips, and with a barely audible clatter of hooves the conveyance slunk away down the narrow, jagged street.

I spun back around to face my friends, frowning sourly.

"Yes, I was wrong," I said. "Elves are just jerks. Odfrin, you've been to one of these before, haven't you? Where do we go?"

The Nord blinked at me, her mouth gone to a tiny rosebud in surprise. "Me? Why, Jon, I've no idea! They always do it in a different place. I've never been here before."

"Right," I said grimly. "Then I guess we had better ask. Come on."

I beckoned to follow as I hurried forward up the metal ramp toward the looming entrance, into the fray of sonorous numerals and tap-rapped choreography. I narrowed in on one of the blue-clad Altmeri tracing a pacing line around the fringe of the operations with long, precise strides, like the swings of a clock, his fingers folded and ticking in the small of his back.

"Greetings," I said in Altmeri, putting myself squarely in the mer's path and smiling warmly. "We are the Imperial Ambassadors from the College of Whispers. Where should we – "

But it was no good. As soon as the elf saw me standing there he did an abrupt about face, clicking his heels together and jerking his body into one pale, perfect perpendicular to the ground. His head snapped sharply away from me, his long, sinewy throat straining against his collar, his heron-arm folded crisp angles out from his side to point one bony finger toward the entrance of the building looming ahead, and he rang our ears with a voice cruel in its sonorous clarity.

"Quaternary; assuming alpha-beta-alpha; 36178-42195; 52.67832145."

I blinked up at the rigidly averted face, nonplussed. "I beg your pardon," I said. "What does this signify? We need to find our way to the Thalmori evening party, don't you understand?"

The elf said nothing, made no sign that he even knew I was there; he just stood, perfectly still and taut as a hung rope, staring away from me and pointing on up the ramp to the gaping doors.

"What's he saying, Jon?" whispered Miles at my back, poking me in the ribs curiously. "Eh?"

"A load of rubbish," I muttered back. "Let me try again. Sir? Sir, my name is _Jon Urfe. _I am an arcane ambassador from the Empire of Tamriel. I and my colleagues are here to attend a dinner with certain agents of the Thalmor and their associates. How should we proceed to this event?"

"54.137215968."

Someone tugged at my sleeve, and I turned to find Tsabhi's whiskers brushing my cheek.

"This one thinks we should follow the finger, Jon," she purred quietly, pointing to the towering elf's rigid digit. "That is the way, mmm?"

I nodded reluctantly, frowning up at the elf's averted face. "I suppose so," I muttered. "But _what _is he saying? Ach. Very well. Let's go."

We set off up the ramp, making our way toward the loading dock's egress through the throng and paralyzing it as we went, for as we walked every elf within ten feet abruptly halted in their singled-minded, oblivious to and fro and clicked their heels together in an exact replication of the first's manner, their narrow fingers compassing toward the entrance. Their strange numerical pronouncements heralded our progression in ringing mathematical acclaim.

"Quaternary; assuming ayem-bedt-ayem; 35129-47821; 319.14."

"Quaternary; assuming ayem-bedt-ayem; 25173-31211; 21.15."

"Quaternary; assuming ayem-bedt-ayem; 26128-33159; 67.3."

"Tertiary; assuming payem-koht-payem; 301-425."

And they remained stiff and frozen, arms rigidly outstretched and harsh, identical faces exaggeratedly averted, until we had passed on at least twenty feet.

"Bloody elves," Miles muttered at my elbow. "I don't know what they're saying, but I'm pretty sure I get the general gist. Snots."

We reached the top of the ramp, where the slick hatches of the wagons opened out onto the metal. The loading area was eerily still with our presence, elves all about frozen in the midst of their work with arms outflung and faces cast away from the sight of us, tense voices ringing out periodically in incoherent numerals. We slowed our pace, picking uneasily through the still crowd. The huge loading doors gaped in on a high, square chamber stacked with anal perfection with unmarked grey crates and barrels. Numerous narrow flights of steps zigged and zagged up the walls to egresses like slits in dead skin.

"That one," Ciene said quietly, pointing to an opening on the far wall, directly opposite. "Looks like they're pointing to that one."

"It does," Ildonis agreed quietly, "but damned if that looks like any place I want to go." The rest nodded their agreement. I must say that it truly _wasn't _the most promising arrangement; it looked more like the entrance to a manufactory for our enslavement than to a posh dinner party.

I pulled myself together after a moment's hesitation. "Come now, people," I chided brightly, "what is this reservation? There is naught that we can do save proceed, so proceed we must, and better with enthusiasm and mirth than fear and grudging stubbornness! Are we truly to be intimidated by these elves, or can we show them the true mettle of our optimism? Hmm?"

Odfrin shook her bright head with a smile, golden curls brushing her soft round shoulders gently.

"'The mettle of our optimism'? _Really, _Jon. But yes, let's do." She wound the fingers of one hand through mine and tugged me forward through the enormous doors, giggling quietly. I jogged after her, shaking my head and laughing as well at my own pomposity. The rest of the group followed at a slower pace, looking cautiously around the high chamber. Behind them, the throng of elves sprang bit by bit back into its strange, unfathomable fray. I caught Odfrin up at the base of the jagged grey stairs, and wrapped my arm tight around her waist.

"Remind me to remember not to forget to let you do the motivating around here. You're much better at it." I murmured the words near her ear.

"Remind me to remember not to forget," she answered back with a dimpled smirk, her pale eyes shining, "that you are quite the opportunist flatterer."

"I beg your pardon," I replied, stepping away drawing myself up to a ridiculous, puff-chested, nose-cocked imitation of an Altmer, "but _I, _Jon Urfe, Specialist in Poly-Spectral Techniques and Phenomena, Ambassador of the College of Whispers, speak nothing but those sentiments which truly arise from soul's wellspring of sincerity." I sniffed haughtily and fluttered my eyelashes in a mockery of elvish indignation as the Nord giggled, the tip of her tongue protruding between her white teeth. "Take it not as flattery, my dear," I went on, lowering my voice with my nose, "but as – "

"What _are _you two on about?" a voice broke in; Ciene, the tiny satin point of Ildonis, Miles, Tsabhi, and Alusan's protective triangle formation. "He's breaking out again, isn't he, Odfrin?" The little Breton stepped nimbly between us, pale face frowning up at me, eyebrows raised in approbation but the twinkle in her dark gaze giving the lie to her seriousness. She wagged a thin finger at me. "Jon, you know better than to accost women when you're covered in pompous-pimples; it's simply not seemly." She turned about to face Odfrin, stepping close to take the Nord's cheeks in her hands and turn her face this way and that under close scrutiny. "Are you much maligned? He didn't burst on you, did he?"

"No, dear," Odfrin laughed as she took Ciene's hands from her cheeks and shook her head at the Breton's antics. "Jon was just entertaining me. Lightening the mood."

"Quite," I agreed, cocking my nose once more. "A bit of levity in these environs is a valuable commodity, madame, and one I'm afraid I find myself stymied in procuring when hindered by certain _female entities _of… diminution." I held Ciene's dark eyes with my own look of affected superiority for a long moment – and then we both dissolved into laughter and stumbled into each other's arms.

"Pompous-pimples!" I gasped, patting her head as it shook against my chest. "Oh, I say, _pompous-pimples!_"

"That's what you are, you!" the woman giggled into my robes. "Listen to yourself! 'Levity!' 'Commodity!' 'Environs!' '_Diminution!'"_

"Why, good sir, do you know what she's implying?" Miles put in from the side, donning his own jester's mask.

"What, my dear fellow? That I'm a great prune too full of his own tongue?"

"Not at all, good sir! No, I'm afraid that what she implies is something much worse, for one such as you. For she implies that you are nothing more than a puffed-up old pincushion!"

I threw back my head and roared with laughter, much to the puzzlement of the rest of the group; but they caught my mirth like a yawn regardless, and we all spent a good few minutes having a hearty chuckle. When we had collected our wits and our dignities back into something resembling a tidy cluster, I turned back to face the high stairs still looming before us.

"Well," I began. "Here we are. Still with the thing to do."

"I'd almost forgotten," Ildonis muttered at my back. "Thanks."

"That little laughing bit did take me out of Alinor for a second, yes," I agreed. "But, really people, we can be a little bit positive about this. There's no need to be so gloomy. We should make the best of this. We should march in there smiling and gay and proud of who we are. We have nothing to be of ashamed of – so let's go. Forward, and forge ahead. Like a parade."

And without waiting for a response, I squared my shoulders, straightened my robes, and lifted my knee to the first of the high, narrow steps, marching my way up toward the dark slit of a door. I knew they would follow. And, indeed – a few moments later a rushed patter of footsteps reached my ears, and I felt a hand catch my arm and then wind its way down and through my fingers with Odfrin's soft touch. The Nord blushed up at me and nudged my side gently with her elbow.

"I believe I was supposed to remind you not to forget something," she said, "but I can't remember what it was. I'm too dazzled by your motivational skills."

I chuckled richly. "The lady wants something, I see. Who flatters now?"

Her eyelids slid a fraction lower. "I? Want something? I don't know what you mean." And the low, purring tone of _that _was enough to set _my _skin a-prickle.

And so we proceeded on up the jagged stairs of that high, square room's edge, as dignified and unruffled as we could possibly make ourselves – except Ciene, of course, whose squeal a few steps in echoed shrilly through the warehouse as Miles swept her easily off her feet and into his arms, to spare her the struggle of the ridiculously tall Altmeri steps; the poor thing nearly had to use her arms to pull herself up them on her own – ignoring and ignored by the still-swarming throng of clattering, crying elves around the entrance, wrapped up in our own consciousness of each other as they were in their mysterious, opaque choreography. Well, _I, _at least, was certainly wrapped up in the feeling of Odfrin's fingers in mine, ensnared in the sensation of her warmth at my side, and I think I am safe in assuming much the same for the others, save Ildonis; Miles bent low to talk with the Breton in his arms as he climbed, and Tsabhi's swaying hips bumped Alusan's playfully every so often as they made their way arm in arm. Even Ildonis seemed happy just to be with us; his round, smiling face hovered pink and shining over Alusan's head as the big man brought up the rear. We had found our consolatory insulation once more.

We reached the top and passed through the thin slit of a door (Ildonis with some difficulty). Beyond we found halls of pale, cracked marble and octagonally-faceted walls, in a bewildering web of acutely angled conjunctions and low-domed rooms empty of all signs of habitation, as pristinely clean as the never-touched. We wandered about for a bit, confused, but eventually found an ascending stairway and followed its gilt-edged steps into the upper levels of the building, passing landing after landing without sign of door or window – and when we were at last confronted with an exit, found it to lead to nothing but a long gallery lined with hanging sheets of sea-silk in every color conceivable and a few not. The next was similarly unhelpful – nothing but a freezing, frost-belching white fog – nor was the one after that, which showed us only a series of still, triangled pools set in the marble floor and rippling in unison at exact intervals with the synced impact of a single drop of water per pool from the ceiling above.

"This one is thinking," Tsabhi growled darkly as we closed that last door and set wearily on up the next flight of steps, "that these Thalmor, these Thalmor are having us on. There is no food, no guest, no banquet, just humiliation in the search."

"No, it is not a trick," Odfrin replied from my side, shaking her head. "I'll guarantee that. It's always like this. Probably they do not even do it on purpose, to be honest. There are much worse humiliations they could choose. No, they just don't think of us, the little golden pig-ears, enough to realize that we might need a little more guidance. we are an - afterthought, I suppose, at these events. But you'll see. Maintain the metal mettle of your optimism!" she finished with a giggle, winking up at me. "Forward and forth!"

"Metal!" I exclaimed in agreement. "Mettle! Optimism!" I gave a brief charge forward up the stairs, dragging along a laughing Odfrin. We sobered quickly back into our dignified promenade, though, as we rounded what must have been the twelfth flight with no end to be reasonably hoped for; we were all huffing and puffing and a bit red in the face from the exertion. Theoretical mages like we were are not well known for their physical fortitude, after all. Miles had passed Ciene off onto Alusan at the third story, and the Redguard on to massive Ildonis at the eighth; cruel as that might seem, the man was so big as to make a tiny increase in weight like Ciene's as nothing. We passed landing after landing, door after closed door, testing all and finding none either inhabited or promising, panting and wheezing and sweating our way up through the seemingly empty building until we were all quite ready to give up the chase and just wait at the distant loading dock below, to be collected when Aatheril finally realized that he had gone too far in his ignorance. Then we heard the voices.

I froze in midstep. Odfrin stumbled on, taken unaware.

"Wha - what?" she stuttered as I caught her arm steadyingly. "What is it?"

"Shhh," I whispered, rubbing her bare shoulder in apology for my abruptness. "Listen."

The voices drifted down the hollow well of the stairs in a high, lilting cadence.

"What are they saying?" Odfrin whispered with wide eyes as Miles climbed into sight behind us, red-faced and sweaty with tiny Ciene once more a scarlet satin bundle in his arms.

"I don't know," I answered. "Too far away. But we're getting close to something, at least. Let's go." We hurried on up the stairs, stepping softly and straining our ears to catch the musical echoes. It was another five flights before we reached the voices' source, but the Altmeri words became distinguishable, at least for me, long before that.

"... the twelfth stain this month, making it the 67th this year. That's a statistically significant difference. Also the color and intensity differs from the reference norms."

"I expected it. The lady's wrappings have accumulated almost three-fold less surface grime in the last 90 days, and I've found creases in her maternity girdles on the last three wardrobe inspections."

"Yes, all together it's quite obvious that she'll soon be joining the epidemic," the first voice went on. "And we'll see how the high manuever to ignore _that._"

"Haven't you heard, though? She won't be the first of the high born to succumb. Why, my cousin stranded me only three days ago about how her lord had soiled not only all his night sleeves for the last three weeks but half his work robes as well! And now the lady's been using even less than normal and unwinding her mother's old void rolls. Nostalgia, supposedly, but everyone knows what it really is."

"Quite. They are not immune. Oh, I do hope that she doesn't, though. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, much less the mistress, whatever I say sometimes. Where do you think she'll hold her elegy period, though, if she can't resist?"

"Don't you know?" Oh, no, you wouldn't, you were only born in the third. What a weak mind I have. Her mother's cousin's husband's niece - Paralon, you know who she is; she's actually succumbed already - is married to one of the naboccis specialists, so she'll go out to their manor on the fields like she did when Salaril was still with her."

"Oh, I see. Auriel forbid that she has to at all, of course. The rejoining will be successful, with love's blessings."

"Yes, we can hope so," the second voice agreed, coolly affirmative as we rounded the last landing and crept up toward a narrow black door set slightly ajar and silhouetted against a brilliant white light.

"Have you selected your own conjoiner, yet?" the voice went on, distant and delicate.

"Yes, I did just recently. Didn't I tell you?" I held a cautionary finger to my lips and eased out of Odfrin's hold as the rest of the group gathered quietly on the stairs. I slipped softly toward the door and peered slowly around its edge into the bright white room beyond.

"No, you didn't. So the specifics are... ?"

The speaker was a seated figure gowned in what looked like nothing more than her own shining hair; spilling out from a knot gathered at the crest of her skull, it sheathed the skinny, featureless body in golden waves held coherent by ringing strips of beaded silver cord. Her thin arms protruded from short slits in the weave, like the bones of a dead bird. She sat with her back to me on a tall white stool like a snake's fang, which let her long legs drape to the glossily pristine floor, her hands busy before her on a stretched section of gleaming sea silk hung on a tall metal frame. The other speaker - seated at the other side of the cloth - was visible only by her splinter-slippered feet kicking and bobbing a hem of similar tawny hair.

"Oh, I thought I had. I chose one of the younger ones, actually. You know about the homosexual pair? One of those. I think she will do fine."

"Yes, of course. It is what they are for, isn't it? So when is the probable celebration?"

"Three weeks and three days. If all goes well, then at that time I shall be with child in the zeroth degree once more."

"Congratulations to you," the second womer said perfunctorily. "If it's successful, of course."

"Of course," the first voice replied coolly, and both fell silent. I waited a few moments to see if they would say anything more that might be of use – maids' pregnancy gossip might be comforting in its normality, but it had little real value – but the two were not forthcoming, so I instead turned back to the hushed huddled of my recuperating colleagues, clasped Odfrin's hand in mine encouragingly, and straightened up to march proudly into the room.

"Do not be alarmed," I said, blinking furiously as my eye adjusted to the fullness of the room's blazing white walls, "we are but peaceful Ambassadors from the College of Whispers, come seeking the Thalmori banquet. Might one of you ladies direct us to where we should go?"

The womer just stared at me and at Odfrin's paleness on my arm for a long moment, identical green eyes wide and surprised behind their lacy lock-veils. Then, as I should perhaps have known they would, their heads snapped simultaneously to the side, averting their vision from our bodies, and the arm of the one closest arrowed a long finger to the door the other was fumbling blindly behind herself to open in the far wall. The latch clicked, and an identical room widened into view beyond; white, pristine walls, a length of shining sea-silk stretched and hung on a metal frame, and two identical hair-apparelled womer who took one look at us and jerked into a mimicry of the first. The second door swung open to reveal a third identical white room, and then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and on and on as though staring into parallel opposed mirrors.

I sighed softly. "Yes, well, thank you for the assistance, I suppose," I said in Altmeri, shaking my head. "You are so _very _helpful around here." I turned back toward the rest of the group where they crowded nervously in the doorframe.

"Onward and in, boss?" Tsabhi purred.

I let out a huff of air. "I suppose so. Who knows what to, though. At least they do seem to have expected us. Ah, well. Onward and in it is."

And so we set off into the long mirror-chain of rooms, edging uneasily around frame after frame of hung sea-silk, trying not to stare or frown at the tendon-tense throats and golden lock-robes of the hundred or so aspect-averted elves we passed, the slamming of doors at Ildonis' hunched and painstakingly careful back a rhythmic, echoing clang punctuating our progress. The place was clearly some kind of cleaning facility, judging from its harsh, aseptic smell and what I had overheard in the stairwell, but it was the oddest laundresses' ward _I _had ever seen. None of the cloth I saw there even seemed soiled. Ah, but I suppose that the Altmer would have different standards on such things than we mortals. Damned elves and their trivial obsessions.

Though it seemed for a time that we might not, that we had in truth entered some kind of reflective, repetitive mirror world, we did at last reach a door that did not lead to yet another tiny white laundry room, but to a high, octagonal hall of milky crystal running perpendicular to our course. We filed curiously out onto the unadorned floor-plane, peering around at the glass-sharded chandeliers shedding their pale light in periodic tears over the empty corridor's faceted walls and etching of inset exits.

"Again?" Ciene stated flatly, shooting sullen glares up and down the hall. "Again no one to guide us? How are we supposed to know which way to –"

An earsplitting cracking ring like the shattering of an enormous tuning fork cut her off. A narrow strip of yellow light oozed out onto the crystal floor from one of the inset exits in its wake, and with it a tall, thin figure in fluttering rainbow robes of layered sea-silk in hues innumerable.

"Don't be so hasty, now," I chided cheerfully, laying my hand on Odfrin's hip and pulling her off down the hall toward the mer. "I daresay we've found our official guide at last. He looks the sort, don't you think?"

But my hopes were quickly destroyed. As we drew nearer to the draped elf, close enough to see and meet his haughty golden stare, he jerked an abrupt two steps backward and snapped his head to the side, straining to stare away from us and into the wall, just as every other elf had done. His arm clicked rigidly up to point back along the spill of yellowish glow he had followed into the hall.

"Don't be so hasty, Jon," Ciene whispered snidely as we sidled past the polychromatic elven statue. "'Official guide' my sun-eschewed ass."

Miles snorted in laughter at her side, and my cheeks warmed in embarrassment.

"Yes, well," I muttered, "these things do happen." Ildonis' answering chuckle rumbled through the low corridor, and we continued on in silence.

The exchange of the normal cold, white lighting of the rest of the elven dwelling for the warmer, yellow tones of the hall we had entered turned out to signify a change in aesthetics much more pervasive than mere lighting. As we entered the low hallway from whence the light sprang and to which the latest elf's finger had pointed us, _everything _changed. The floors went from milky white crystal to a kind of polished, gold-brown stone, similar to tiger's eye, whose tawny, chatoyant stripes shifted and stretched as we walked. The walls were no longer bent out in the points of an octagon, but square-cornered as they should be. Above that they had gone from smooth and plain to textured in a shallow diamond press, their color a strange, unnaturally homogenous grey. It was almost as though the elves had attempted to simulate rough-hewn castle walls and wooden floors, but had had only travelers' sketches and descriptions from which to design. As we penetrated deeper into the odd new area, we found that the light was generated not by enchanted crystals or magical flames, as was common in Alinor, but by real, true, working-man's tallow candles, set awkwardly on square, shoulder-high outcroppings of the grey crystal walls, as though the elven architects really hadn't been at all clear on how one was to position such a thing.

We stopped and gathered around the first one we saw, eyeing it dubiously and trading uncertain looks. I don't think any of us credited the existence of the thing, burning there without a care for the misplaced disconnect of its simple little stick of wax and string wick in the city of glow-orbs and lattice-flames. None of us had seen such a thing for weeks.

Miles leaned forward, eyebrow raised doubtfully. Then he pursed his lips and blew out a puff of air over the flame. It vanished with a sputter and a spurt of smoky curlicues, to our surprise, and left us staring around in darkness.

"Miles!" Odfrin exclaimed. "What did you do that for? Do you know how long it's been since I've seen – _ohhhh, _but the _smell._" She snatche dthe candle from its awkward pedestal, spilling hot wax on the silky floor, and drew the extinguished wick slowly beneath her nose, inhaling deeply. Her eyes shuddered closed as her lips curled in a cat's tight, contented little smile. She hummed lowly. "Mmmm, never mind. This is good. Very good. Jon, smell it! It's _good_._"_

She held the candle up to my nose with an eager, bright look in her eyes. I drew in a deep breath, and the rich scent of real smoke hit my gut with a wallop of poignant warmth.

"Home," I murmured. "Smells like home."

"_Yes,_" the Nord whispered happily, snatching the candle back under her own nose again. "_Home_. Oh, but it doesn't last long. Come on, come on, the next one, the next one, everyone has to smell it!" She rushed on ahead toward the next pool of flickering yellow light.

"This one smells it already," Tsabhi purred from beside me on Alusan's arm. "Very much of home."

"I wonder why the elves have candles here?" Miles mused. "Not their usual style."

"Perhaps we entered the charity den without knowing it," Alusan suggested wryly. "Only the poor in Alinor would even recognize the smell."

"No, it's more like they're purposefully trying to make things seem familiar to us," Ciene put in seriously. "Look at the walls, the floor. Nothing like the elves normally use."

"But why –" I began, but stopped short as a bobbing bundle of yellow light came flickering up on us.

"Here, here, I have it!" Odfrin exclaimed, cradling a second, still lit, taper in her hands. Her sweet face was soft shadows and warm highlights in its orange-yellow glow. "Everybody get close in; you all have to smell it. Come on, all together!' She wound her arm through mine excitedly, pulling me tight against her side as the rest crowded smilingly in.

"Now lean close," she whispered, and held out the candle. Our heads drew in toward it, flushed bright and stark in its easy glow; Ildonis' round cheeks opposite me, Alusan's dark handsomeness snugged up against one of the big man's shoulders, Miles' freckled, smiling face against the other; Tsabhi's whiskers brushing my lips next to Alusan; little Ciene cuddled close to both Miles and Odfrin and watching me blankly past the flame; Odfrin's cheek pressed against mine, her arm against my side and fingers gripping my thigh. She whispered soft wonder to us.

"We're all going to go home, now," she said. "For one second, we're all going to go home. Together. Home. All of us. _Home._" Here exhalation extinguished the tiny flame. And for one moment, one single second as I watched the smoke spin spirals and snake-wrangles through the air and drew its scent deep into my lungs, seeing the simple peace spread on the faces of my friends, I was, indeed, home.


	15. Chapter 14

**AN: AN: Good golly gee, I'm sorry this is so slow. This is half of what was a 50+ page chapter in my notebook. I'm so far ahead of you guys now it's not even funny. I'd like to extend a big thank you to Hrafnir II for doing the Aldmeri translations in this chapter, and for helping me out generally behind the scenes with language related stuff. Almost all of the new Aldmeri terms present in this piece were created by Hrafnir II. He's amazing; you should all go check out his thread on languages over at The Imperial Library (in the Fan Creations section).  
**

**Chapter XIV**

Thusly we went; dashing along the warped reflection of a normal human hallway, giggling and laughing and snorting madly as we snatched candle after candle from their square settings and blew them promptly out to inhale their aromatic exhalations, warmly contented in our huddled clusters. We shed shadows in our wake, beating the yellow glow back, down the chatoyant corridor, around the corner, up a set of spiral, tiger-eyed stairs, until at last we ran it to ground in its last sanctuary, and emerged – flushed, panting, laden with armfuls of warm tapers, flecked all about with bits of creamy, cooled wax, unconcerned with anything but each other and the comforting phenomenon we had discovered – from the last curve of the narrow staircase, into a long, arch-ceilinged chamber, lined with more real, guttering candles and of much the same construction as the halls behind us. Empty save for one long, magnificent, polished mahogany dining table and its roster of carved, high-backed chairs, its exact arrangement of simple silver cutlery, porcelain plates, crystal bowls, and platinum goblets, the room had neither windows nor visible exit save the door in which we made our hesitant surveyance.

"What, do you – think this is it?" Miles panted, his freckled face red as a tomato, candlesticks tumbling from his arms. "There's – no one here."

Tsabhi purred out a laugh. "Stupid elves! They have forgotten the date! They are all late."

"Or they've already eaten," Ciene giggled. "Maybe they'll let us have some scraps?" She dissolved into incoherent sobs of mirth.

"Oh no no no you sillies," Odfrin gushed, rolling pale eyes at us and dimpling her rose-rubbed round cheeks. "It's _always _like this. The elves _never _let us eat with them. Come on, you'll see." She stepped backward onto the tawny gleam of the tiger-eyed floor, taking my hands in hers and tugging me out after her. Her eyes twinkled brightly in the candlelight.

"Is it simply my eye," I said as we approached one end of the long table, "or is there something missing here? I cannot see find victuals of any shape, size, or quality."

"Do you know, my dear fellow, I don't think it _is _your eye," Miles answered promptly, raising his eyebrows at the empty plates and goblets, brushing bits of wax off his robes, his arms empty except for Ciene's waist. "I daresay they really _have _forgotten the sustenance! Entirely! How peculiar."

"It's an exercise," replied the tiny Breton at his side. Her face still shone, but the edge of her joy had been dulled by a faint droop in the corner of her dark eyes. "The elves want us to attempt to feed ourselves solely on the _imagination _of food."

"Not _quite _what you postulated, Jon," Miles continued, "but not too far off, either. Although I'm not sure this method will make us quite as full up at its end as the other."

"Silly heads, sit down!" Odfrin laughed as she tumbled into one of the huge, cushion-less chairs, pulling me down into the one next to her. "Sit down and you'll see. _Something _will happen."

"What will happen?" Alusan asked curiously as he settled down with Tsabhi, across from Odfrin and me. Miles attempted to take the seat next to the Khajiit, but Ciene's face flashed momentary exasperation before blinking sweet smiles up at him as her hand on the small of his back quietly steered him around to our side of the table. They sat at Odfrin's other side, Ciene in between the Nord and the bemused Nibenean. Ildonis pulled out the head seat with a shrug and let his majestic, brown-robed bulk fill the chair's creaking crannies; he was the only one for whom the things did not seem ridiculously oversized. "What do you mean, Odfrin?" the Redguard's deep voice went on when we were all seated in a cluster around Ildonis at the table's head. "What will happen?"

"Oh, I've no idea!" Odfrin exclaimed happily. "But _something _will, for sure. _Something _always does."

"What sort of 'something,' though? Majestic entrance, grand display? What –" but a sudden, deafening crunch as of grinding stone both cut off his words and granted him his explanation, as the thin veil of normality the elves had woven for our comfort was abruptly ripped away like a virgin's bridal shroud.

The room disintegrated around us. The walls shattered into innumerable individual tiles of grey diamond crystal and spun off into the vastness of the revealed surrounding space; the ceiling tore raggedly down its arched cloth belly and fell in tatters past the edge of the floor; and with a shudder, the entire shorn platform began to rise. Cutlery rattled and clattered across the table; the unoccupied chairs drummed a bee's low hum against the floor, buzzing through my teeth; Tsabhi's fur stood wildly on end around her head; Odfrin's fingers clutched my arm almost bruisingly; and we rose up, up, up into the sight of an entire cylindrical gallery of elves.

Tier upon tier of pristine, translucent crystal, rising at least a hundred feet above our heads and falling perhaps as many below our sleek-streaked floor, ringing us tightly round in table above and table below table after circular, hollowed-out table, and in elves, elves, _elves; _thin, sharp, slanted like knives, gold skin pale and sickly, washed-out in the chamber's diffuse white illumination; legion upon legion of nearly indistinguishable haughty faces, pared down like gilded masks tight over bare bone and muscle, eyes like gleaming, empty gems, beautiful and terrible and androgynous to a terrible parody of perfection. Elves with straight black hair styled into harsh, cruel lines like the edges of numerals; elves with hair like spun sunlight, twined and twirled up into spiraling, teetering towers set with sparkling gems and spikes of polished metal and glass; elves with bistre locks coiled and coiled into knots and knots and knots, squeezing their skulls and roiling rigid and stiff on their bony shoulders. Elves in robes of nothing more than thousands and thousands of unbound black threads, draped from tight collars of glossy obsidian; elves in sleek dresses of purest white byssus, their golden shoulders bare and their heads framed in ornate silver settings; elves garbed in the multicolored tracery of lattice-lace, their flesh but a setting for its intricacies; elves in fluttering fanned furls of silk spun to tiny feathered spines; elves in metal masks and scant, ornate bustiers; elves in voluminous sea-silken robes and massive, overpowering head-dresses like the display horns of strange, extinct beasts; and against all this fantasy of polychromatic fashion and alloy-artificed form, the Thalmor; stark, dark, hard-edged, and sheer; in stiffly simple robes of grey and black slashed and stripped in narrow pleated parallels, with tight cuffs and high collars, their thick, oiled black braids draped over their shoulders like snakes. Elves, in all their coldness, all their distance, all their palpable alienation from us and from each other, made all the more horrible by their play-acting at sincere sociality. Their bell-high voices rang out around us in laughter and argument and story and song, but the sound was hollow, false; their jaws worked their food just like any human's, but their hollow cheeks bulged sickeningly with the turn of each bite, and the motion was exact, artificial, a mechanical mastication; their lips pursed on the rims of their crystal goblets same as any other mortal, but stained glowing, milky white with some strange, viscous elven drink instead of the proper red of wine; their faces twisted and contorted like animated masks into terrifying imitations of curiousity, mirth, desire, dismay, but their eyes never shifted from their cold, glittering, unyielding reserve. They manipulate their own bodies as mere tools and prisons, just as they do the rest of the world; they do not truly live in their own flesh. And they did not truly _live _that night, either, though they talked and ate and did all of the things that the living do. We, the puny mortals seated and ignored on a massive gem-stone platter under their High Elven eyes, were the only ones there who truly knew what it meant to live.

For a long minute all that any of us could do was stare about in wonder and intimidation. Then Ildonis put one huge hand over his eyes, sighing heavily.

"Dibella save us," he muttered. "We've been consigned to the asylum of bad fashion."

It broke the tension. We laughed, and settled more easily into the situation.

"Well," Alusan said through the tail end of a chuckle, grinning lopsidedly over at Odfrin, "_something_ did, indeed, happen. Was this what you were expecting?"

"I had no expectations," the Nord answered. "I mean, they always child's-table us, but apart from that there's no real prediction of what might happen. Once they had us sequestered inside a giant ice-box. I didn't really mind it, but the rest of the group did not cope nearly so well. Comparatively, this really isn't that bad. They ignore us, we ignore them, and have a perfectly pleasant meal in peace."

"Seconded!" I exclaimed. "There's no reason we should not enjoy ourselves tonight, even if we are specimens on display."

"Easy for you to say!" Ildonis grumbled through a deep chuckle. "you don't have a cadre of Thalmor and Thalmori pawns staring you down!" One huge hand gestured toward the section of the gallery directly opposite him, where, indeed, a long line of harsh-robed Thalmor sat with goblets and cutlery in their hands and lines of milk-drink glistening on their golden lips, watching us disgustedly and conversing inaudibly with the two simmeringly-apparelled non-Thalmori elves in their midst. Aatheril's single-toothed grin glimmered at us from the end of the line. "I'm afraid I'll be taken away for questioning if I mishandle my meal. _Why did you switch to the salad fork so soon? Why? Tell us the secrets of your etiquette cypher, man-scum!"_

Our laughter rang around the table once more. Lldonis grinned broadly, his round cheeks dimpling.

"But, speaking more seriously," he went on, "yes, I agree; we should behave as though we dine alone. So the elves find it amusing to put us on display as though part of a dinner theatre; well, I say, if such is as it must be then we might as well give them a damned good performance of human life."

"Mmm, yes," Tsabhi purred, "yes, show them how _real _people are behaving, yes? Yes. But for this – we need the food! How to feast and make merry without the food?"

I nodded agreement. "It is most necessary. There's no simpler and more effective cement for companionship than food. But – well, we can't expect the elves to know that, and they are so anal about their food. What do you think, Odfrin, will we be fed? Or should we commence with our own measures?"

"Oh, we're always fed," she answered dreamily, smiling up at me. "The elves had to bring food from everywhere on the island for this event anyway, to feed all these different elves; it isn't really much more of a difficulty to procure food from - and, look, here it is."

She waved a hand upward, toward where the meeting of ceiling and wall would have been had we had either, and we all turned and craned our necks to see what she meant. A long platform had extended out from the gallery's wall and hung above us, just a few yards distant. Upon it stood a tight cluster of portable folding tables, laden, no doubt, with many things, but none we could see due to the angle. A single, pasty little elf in tight robes radiating rings of red, yellow, and orange from his chest stood there, wringing his bony hands and rocking from side to side as he surveyed his hidden stock. Every few seconds his eyes darted irresistibly toward us, and his head gave a little shudder.

"Well would you look at that," Alusan murmured. "They've given us a server. I never would have believed it. Incredible."

"No kidding," Ciene giggled suddenly, wrinkling her little nose. "An entire server for seven mortals? We must be at the seat of Altmeri opulence, here."

"Hush, hush," Odfrin broke in on the answering chuckles, waving her hands quellingly. "He's getting ready to perform. We mustn't distract him."

The elf had somehow procured a twelve foot pole of silver-white metal, and was wobbling it hesitantly about near the edge of his platform. A momentary shift in the light glinted a thin streak from something long and clear dangling from the pole's end; a thread, I realized, and from the end of the thread, a silver hook. What was it for, though… ? But then the elf took a deep, steadying breath, and stepped to the edge of his platform.

A huge, warped crockery striped gold and blue dangled precariously by one swooping handle from the pole's suspended hook. The elf slowly extended the pole out over our table as we watched, dumbstruck. His skinny arms, bared by the voluminous sleeves fallen back around his shoulders, trembled visibly, and sweat glistened dawn beads on his forehead. I had never seen an Altmer sweat, before that night. The strange crockery slowly descended on its nearly invisible string, then settled with a gentle bump onto the gleaming mahogany. We stared at it, silent. The pole retreated, and then returned, this time with a bowl sealed with a ridiculously fat stopper, and repeated its slow, trembling deposition. And on the elf went, like that; lowering one by one a hundred sealed dishes of strangely warped and impractical designs among us, cluttering the table with a hurried, disorganized mess of pitchers, bowls, crocks, and a wide assortment of dishware so strangely shaped that I couldn't even _think _of their possible function; a swirling, tubular spire, with a capped discharge valve near the bottom; a clear, wavery bowl, pocked with holes and seemingly empty, set in a shallow white basin; a striated platter supported on a narrow split foot and so steeply sloped it could not possibly support a slice of meat or bread. It seemed that the elven supply of sensible, human dishes had been exhausted at plates, cutlery, and goblets, and they had been forced to _allow _us to use their own ridiculously non-functional creations. I daresay that none of us appreciated the honor.

We kept quiet as the elf above went quaveringly about his work, sensing that Odfrin was right; if we wanted to get _anything _to eat, we should let the mer work undisturbed. I almost felt sorry for the fellow; he was clearly terrified of us. Almost, but not quite.

At last the final sealed tureen clinked to the table, and the pole declined to return from its retreat. Above the high hum of conversation of the surrounding elf-gallery, I heard a heavy, relieved sigh as our server began folding down his many preparatory tables. I suppose that was what made me do it.

I raised my voice and called out to the mer in Altmeri. "Good show, sir, wholly good show! You have a talent! And we're all thankful for it down here, indeed; devilishly hungry, aren't we? _Devilishly _hungry!"

The elf froze. His back stiffened, straight and rigid, in a slow shudder. His head began to tremble, but turned slowly back to look down at us, as though impelled. I met his wide eyes with a wry smile.

"Yes, you sir!" I cried. "We thank you! Most generous of you. I say, wouldn't you like to join us? We're going to feed now!"

Tendons popped out on the mer's skinny neck. A high, shrill keening leaked out from between his perfect white teeth as he stared at me, paralyzed – and then leapt abruptly into motion, snatching his pole and his tables under his arms and dashing off down the platform's path and out of the gallery, tripping over his own feet and spilling tables over the edge as he went.

The entire group stared at me.

"Good gods, Jon," Miles said after a moment. "What did you _say _to him?"

I tipped my head and shrugged apologetically. "The worst thing possible, I suppose; I invited him to join us."

A wondering, incredulous laugh ran around the table. Alusan shook his head disbelievingly. Beside him, Tsabhi shrugged.

"In Elsweyr, there is a forbidden sport," she began, "that only the worst of the Khajiit play. A gambling sport. Gangs of bad cats kidnap and imprison Khajiit who have gone feral with the Madgod's touch, or drive normal Khajiit so with certain drugs and illusion magicks, then make them fight each other and let spectators bet. One of the punishments for new members in one of these gambling gangs, or for kidnapped debtors, is to feed the ferals. They do it much like this elf here… and look much the same when they are through. Feral Khajiit are most fearsome. This one thinks the elf though Jon invited it to be _eaten, _itself."

Ildonis snorted a laugh. "No doubt, my dear," he said. "It would not surprise me to learn that the elves think we might eat them. Although, considering the practices of their own Valenwood allies, you might think the idea wouldn't be so horrific." He rubbed his huge hands together. "But enough of that. I'm ready to finally see what we're _actually _going to eat, and whether or not it's edible in any normal sense of the word. Break out, folks. Dive in." And he bent promptly forward to lift the lid from a fat, slanted pot. The rest of us followed his example, lifting lids, testing ladles, wafting aromas, and pouring samples. The table erupted in mushroom clouds of steam and strange scents. For perhaps an entire minute the room was silent save for the clatter of dishes as we investigated the contents of the many strange elven containers – but one by one we sat back without having touched a single morsel, looking around at each other with mouths tight in suppressed mirth.

Ildonis was the last to resign. He replaced the lid of a swirled green dish, and leaned back in his chair, his massive, majestic bulk making its joints creak uncertainly. He frowned down at the crowded, laden length of the table, his mouth a pudgy downturned 'u'. Then he looked around at us, his eyebrows raised nearly to his blond hairline, and quite abruptly burst out in laughter.

He carried us quite along with him; on into that particular brand of mirth that keeps on rolling in spasms of laughter even though one's abdomen aches with the convulsions of incomprehensible howls and squeals and roars of amusement and even though the object itself was not so funny in the first place; an irresistible, contagious outburst of humor that runs unbridled until it has exhausted one's immediate physical resources, and then rises up in bubbles and spurts and spouts of giggles and guffaws for some time afterward. It was at least five minutes before any of us were fit to speak.

Ciene leaned forward to lift the lid from a shallow casserole basin, her thin shoulders shaking with silent giggles.

"Boiled turnips," she managed, "in _garlic sauce." _Her face contorted into a mixture of hilarity and disgust, and she let the lid drop back down over the turnips with a clang.

"Plum-stuffed octopus," stated Alusan, shaking his head and pointing to a lopsided pie-pan.

"Kwama eggs," Miles said with a shudder, "pickled with beets and lemons."

"_Succotash,_" Odfrin sighed, and pushed a long, tentacle-shaped tureen a little farther away from her.

Ildonis pointed a fat finger to the blue pot. "Venison pie. With apples."

"Potatoes and prairie toads," I put in, "mashed. Oh, and they've left the skins on. For both."

Tsabhi lifted something jointed and sparkling between her claws. "Candied. Mudcrab. Leg."

We traded amused looks, and then shared another laugh as the Khajiit dropped the crap leg disgustedly.

"_Well,_" Ildonis said, "_well. _I suppose I'm not really surprised. I suppose the only reason we haven't been suffering through this sort of elven culinary incompetence already is because we've been preparing the food ourselves."

"I wish we could do that _here,_" Ciene muttered, eyeing the turnips. "This is the worst spread I've ever seen. Nothing here is edible."  
Alusan gave a deep chuckle. "Oh, this is _edible, _just not appetizing. If you want _inedible, _you'd have to go to the Dreugh, or maybe Thras. Just suspend your High Rock connoisseur sensibilities for a few hours and you'll be fine."

"I'm not _even _a connoisseur," the Breton insisted, shaking her head, sending her sleek helmet of hair asway. "This is just horrible."

Ildonis heaved a heavy sigh. "Oh, I agree, Ciene, I agree. But Alusan is right, still. Better to make the best of it. So pass me those turnips, girl, and let's begin."

The Breton's pouting mouth twisted even further, but she lifted the basin nonetheless and passed it to Odfrin and then to me for the big man to spoon out a few of the greasy purple lumps, as I was nearly suffocated by the smell of garlic from the dish under my nose.

We waited, holding our breath, as the Imperial carefully cut up one of the turnips and placed it hesitantly in his mouth. He chewed a long few seconds, face impassive. Then he swallowed, and shrugged.

"Not halfway terrible," he said, forking another. "Go on, you wimps. Try something. It's not that bad."

And so, reluctant and repulsed and laughing with the ridiculousness of the situation, we did; we dove bravely into the strange Altmeri dishware, and emerged with their equally odd attempts at human food for prize, of combinations only a chef completely ignorant of human culinary culture and with a heavy assumption that it must be both utterly bizarre and completely unrefined could have concocted. Some of the dishes were so strange and out of my experience that I could not even discern from what they had been made; others, like those we had first found, were simply unheard of combinations of things we all knew. I cannot say that any of it was truly _appetizing, _but I found none of it truly _repulsive, _either, once I overcame the initial shock of the jarring conjunctions. And all of it was interesting; I will say that.

We ate like cautious, questing children, probing and dissecting every bite with knife and fork before ever so slowly placing a piece on our tongues, exclaiming in laughter or disgust when we found with something we found something particularly strange, our meal punctuated by the occasional coughing fit as one of us found something we simply could not force ourselves to stomach. For all that, though, most of us did at least _try _everything on the table – save Ciene, who could not overcome her disgust for the garlic smothered turnips, and Odfrin, who refused to try the succotash.

"I just can't do it," she said, rubbing her bare arms and shivering as I dolloped out some of the vegetable mash. "It's not even that they've done anything wrong to it; I just can't stand succotash."

I shrugged as I took a bite of the stuff. "Tastes fine to me."

She shuddered again. "It's horrible. Like eating cattle feed. So gross."

"I guess I like cattle feed, then," I replied, smiling wryly. "Does that make me a cow?"

Her pale eyebrows quirked, and she slid me a slow, lazy-eyed smirk. "No, not a cow, Jon," she said, her low alto pitched for my ears only, "more like an ox. A bull. A _stud _bull."

I paused with my fork halfway to my mouth to turn a shocked star on her. She just smiled at me, pale eyes heavy-lidded and smoky. My heart pounded a little harder. I turned back to my plate after a long, spellbound moment, too affected to speak. The Nord laughed softly in my ear, and patted my thigh beneath the table before applying herself to her meal in earnest.

We ate in relative silence for a time, each of us occupied in coping with the strangenesses of our own plates; the clink of forks and knives the only sound aside from the pervasive hum of the many elves conversing around us. Then Ciene let her spoon clatter down to her plate, sighing heavily.

"Oh, _why _can't they just do _one thing _normally?" she said. "Just _one thing_? One little bit of normality! It's like they're _trying _to make us homesick."

"Of course they're trying," Alusan replied, with a brief chuckle. "It's only to be expected. They're elves; we're not. This is their land, and they don't think we should even be here, much less feel at _home _here. Besides that conscious effort, though, like we were saying before – they're _not _like us. They are something completely different. They don't think like us. They don't act like us. There's nothing _normal _about them."

"Oh oh oh, I have to disagree with you there," I said, wagging a finger at the Redguard as Ciene nodded her agreement. "I have an example of something normal about the Altmer. A _fresh _example, actually."

The Redguard quirked one dark eyebrow. "A 'fresh' example of normality, Jon? Do share."

"The maids," I went on simply. "The maids are normal."

"What maids?" Ciene asked laughingly.

"Oh, you know them, the ones we passed earlier. The ones wearing their hair. They're normal."

"How so?" Alusan replied incredulously. "They looked anything _but _normal to me."

"Oh, sure, they didn't _look _normal," I agreed with a ceding shrug, "and superficially, they didn't sound normal either. But when it comes down to it – and you'll have to take my word on this, of course, since no one else here knows enough Altmeri to confirm – when it comes down to it, they were just doing what maids everywhere do: gossiping about each other and their betters."

The Redguard scoffed lightly. "Well, that's a bit of a superficial normality, wouldn't you say, Jon? So they gossiped; what of it? It doesn't mean their gossip was _normal. _That depends on what they were gossiping about."

"Well, yes, it does," I said, nodding and toying idly with my fork. "But as far as I can tell the content of their gossip _was _normal. They were just talking about their mistress' – well, nighttime habits with her lord. Speculating on the possibility of a child in the near future, I think. Why, there was even talk of a conception celebration! Not for the mistress, mind, for one of the maids; I take it she hoped to be pregnant soon. Now if _that _isn't normal for maids to gossip about – then I suppose I must not know what maids normally gossip about."

Alusan frowned for a moment, thinking, then shrugged grudgingly. "I'll agree there," he said. "If that's what they were talking about, then it is pretty normal. Point conceded. Still, though, it's clear that mostly we should expect anything but normality from them."

"Of course," I replied. "Yes, yes, of course. I –"

"What did they say, Jon?"

Odfrin's soft voice, strangely timid, stopped my words gently in mid-flow. She watched me quietly, haloed in golden curls with her head back against her chair, eyes dull and subdued.

"Pardon?" I said after a moment, taken aback.

"The maid," Odfrin answered softly. "You said 'conception celebration.' Is that a direct translation?"

"Well, no," I mused slowly, "no, not direct."

"What _did _she say, then? Exactly."

I frowned, thinking. "Hmm. Exactly. I believe her words were 'hevla mocarumu,' which means,**'**conjunction celebration.' She also said 'washe aur'navanye am ge av delium nulli,' which translates to, 'I will soon be with child in the zeroth degree once more.' Together I took them to mean that she would soon be pregnant again and would have a party to celebrate. Why do you – Odfrin? Odfrin, what's wrong?"

The Nord had gone even paler than usual. Her eyes were the dead slate of a coiling thunderstorm at noon in place of their usual brilliant midwinter's pre-splintered dawn. She looked away from me, staring down at hands gone limp and loose in her lap.

"Odfrin?" I repeated more gently. I turned my whole body toward her and cupped her hands in my palms worriedly. I spoke low and soft, my head bent in close to hers. "Come on, Odfrin. You can tell me. What's wrong?" From the other side, Ciene wrapped a comforting arm around the Nord's slumped shoulders.

"You can tell _us," _the Breton said. "You can tell us." She ignored my surprised – and, I admit, slightly offended – stare utterly, entirely focused on Odfrin.

"It's just that it isn't what you think it is, Jon," the Nord burst out suddenly, flinging her head up to stare with eyes rimmed in pink and dewy with tears. "It's not – not _normal _in _any way!_" She gasped out the words and caught herself in a choking sob. She paused, swallowing back more tears. "But it _is _normal, too," she went on in a sudden rush. "To all of _them, _out there, those awful, _evil _elves, it _is _normal." She gestured fiercely out at the oblivious gallery surrounding us. "And that's what – that's _why _I'm ruining our fun, why I can't help it; because it _is _normal, for them. That any… _mother _could do that horrifies me, but that the whole society of them would condone and support and _celebrate _it… I cannot stand it. It turns me black and dead inside."

A hushed silence held us as her words trailed off. That Odfrin, normally so happy and effervescent and unflappable should be so upset by something…

I worked my reluctant tongue. "What – what is normal for them, Odfrin?"

The Nord sighed. The sound was like the slip of her spirit between her teeth. "The 'conjunction celebration' isn't for the joy of life, Jon. It's for the joy of death. The maid will not conceive in that ceremony. She will _un_conceive. She will – she will murder her own unborn babe."

"No," Miles breathed softly. "No." Alusan's eyes were wide and ghostly with shock against his dark skin. Ildonis settled heavily back in his chair, his plump mouth gone thin and hard. Tsabhi's snout tightened into hard ridges; her ears lay flat against her skull.

"Yes," Odfrin choked out, nodding and blinking furiously through her tears. "Yes. That's what they do. That's what it means to be '_with child_ in the zeroth degree.' That's what they call themselves when they're not pregnant. And that's how they want to keep themselves. Keep the child 'infinitive.' Unrealized. Unborn. The act is _glorified. _They _celebrate _it."

"But _why_?" whispered Ciene past the hand held over her gaping, horrified mouth. "_Why?_"

Odfrin laughed, then. The sound was like a horse's struggling death. "Because," she answered, not looking at the Breton but glaring moodily off into the distance, "underneath all their arrogance, elves hate themselves as much as they hate the rest of the world. They say they do it to 'maintain a pure lineage,' or to save the child from a 'suboptimal environment;' to prevent 'the tragedy of birth,' and 'save' the child from sundering. They lie. They _kill _their children in the womb. For no other reason than the fact that they cannot stand to see another one of their own kind in the arms of Nirn."

Ildonis shook his head grimly, staring stonily down into the table's grain. Beside him, Alusan leaned back in his chair, sighing and wrinkling his dark brow with callused fingers. We kept silent for a long while, each lost in their own sadness, trying desperately to forget the elves around us, and utterly unsuccessful. The high hum of their voices buzzed hatefully in our ears. I tightened my grip on Odfrin's hands and rubbed my thumbs over her wrists. She squeezed back, glancing up at me with shy sadness, and let her head fall sideways to rest against my shoulder. I could feel her breath rustling the folds of my cravat. Ciene watched us impassively for a moment, dark eyes huge and inscrutable, then withdrew her arm from Odfrin's shoulder. I slipped mine around in its place, drawing the Nord closer as I mouthed a silent 'thank you' across to Ciene. She nodded dumbly, gaze lost in her lap.

Miles' voice broke the silence abruptly. "Gods, but I _hate _this place!" he snapped. We looked round at him in surprise. "I mean, you know?" he went on vehemently. "Every time I think we've reached the bottom I learn something awful like _that. _Does it never _end, _Odfrin? Is there no maximum degree to their debasement?"  
The Nord shook her head against my chest. "Not really," she answered quietly. "There's always something worse. Living in Alinor is an eternal internal unfolding of horror."

"This one doesn't know how Odfrin does it," Tsabhi purred wonderingly. "Here so long, here so alone, no kits to keep you company? Tsabhi would not survive."

Odfrin gave a little laugh, raising a hand to wipe at her eyes. "I did it by not thinking about it. I can not think about almost anything. Well, maybe _anything, _really. I've never yet found something I couldn't not think about – well, anything bad, at least." Her fingers tightened on mine. "So maybe – but, oh, I surely don't want to find it, if there is something out there."

She straightened suddenly up, pushing off my chest and out of my arm but keeping my hand twined tightly through hers. "That's all done though anyway," she said, one of her sweet, soft, dimpled smiles breaking through her tear streaked cheeks. "I don't have to not think about things anymore, because now I have all of you." She blinked up at me with those wide, pale eyes gleaming like backlit blue ice. "Now I have all of you."

"That you do, Odfrin," I said. Her eyes were the only things in the world. "That you do."

"Hear, hear," Miles cried softly. "We've got each other, and that's all we need. Aye, Ciene?" He slid his arm round the Breton's thin shoulders, giving her a little shake to rouse her from her reverie – but a dull 'Aye' was the only response he got.

"Each other we have, no doubt," Ildonis agreed, sitting forward once more, "but let's not discount the power of not thinking about things. I say, if we _can _use it, then we should. No use rejecting anything that might help. And as I see it," he went on, reaching across the table to snag the glass basket of crystallized mudcrab legs, "there are three things that work better than any other for not thinking about things. One would be impolite in company, the next seems to have been omitted at this dinner, but the third – ah! The third is quite close at hand. If anything will help us not think about what should not be thought about, it's the remnants of this horrendous meal." He split a greyish exoskeleton along its length with a crack. "So set to, folks. I'd say it can't get any worse as it gets cold, but, well – I think we've already established that that would be a serious overestimation."

We laughed wryly as the big man grinned around at us, licking the sticky sugar from his fingers, and set busily to rousing ourselves from our slump. The rest of the meal was concluded in relative cheer; we slid gradually back into our gay party personalities, into our exaggerated exclamations over the food, our mockery of elven mannerisms, and our bursting bouts of mirth. It was all a bit artificially underscored by what had gone before, at first, but we kept a tacit agreement to maintain the façade.

"What _I _find the strangest about these elves," Alusan said wonderingly when he had tucked away one last piece of apple and venison pie – which I will admit was actually quite tasty – "isn't any of their bizarre philosophies, strange magicks, or absurd customs, but their _clothes. _I mean, just look around!" He waved a hand about at the surrounding gallery of milk-lipped elves in all their over-artificed finery. "Have you ever seen so many simply _ugly _outfits all in one place? You were straight on, Ildonis, when you called this the asylum of bad fashion."

Miles nodded his agreement as he chewed a bite of turnip. "It's almost as though they've _tried _to outfit themselves in the least attractive ways possible," he said when he had swallowed.

"I mean, look at these two here," Alusan went on over the Imperial, gesturing down the table to the curving line of Thalmor sitting opposite Ildonis, beyond the gap to the gallery. The pair of elves he indicated, though, were not Thalmor, though they sat in their midst to either side of a particularly sharp-eyed and severe-looking female; the womer's magnificent pale dress, with its frilled bosom tinged fluttering pink like a sea-shell clasping golden pearls, clashed horribly with the stark Thalmori at her side, as did the mer's sweeping swirl of grey-green eils. They sat oblivious to our scrutiny, completely absorbed in listening to the intense-eyed Thalmor between them. "Just _look _at them!" the Redguard exclaimed. "Who _wears _that sort of thing? Yes, your people do get up to some strange hijinks, Miles," he ceded as the Nibenean shrugged and began to comment, "but nothing like what's _everywhere _here. Admitted that I'm no connoisseur of clothing, but that's what's so amazing; even _I _can tell that they're just plain ugly."

Tsabhi rolled out a low laugh at his side. "Alusan speaks true," she said, rubbing the man's forearm fondly, "the elves have no sense of fashion."

"Why, though?" I put in curiously. "That's what interests me. Of course it's all subjective, but why don't we like their sense of fashion? Not to resurrect the family loon, but the Empires of Tamriel _have _taken a great deal from the Aldmeri Dominion, culturally. So why don't we think their fashion attractive?"

"Because we're not artistically obtuse out the arse," Ciene answered dryly. Everyone but me laughed loudly; Ildonis' deep chuckle rattled the unused silverware at the opposite end of the table.

"Oh, come now," I began, but the Nord at my side put her hand over my mouth. "She stuck her tongue out at me briefly, then turned to the rest of the group.

"I'll tell you what someone once told me," she said in a rush, her pale eyes twinkling brightly once more. That sight was more than enough to soothe my miffed feelings at having been silenced. "_I _heard that it's nothing but a joke! A joke on the elves, _by _the elves! The story is that once, way back in the First Era, there was a huge ball held by a grand king of Alinor, a ball that everyone important on the whole island was invited to. Only, the king was both very fickle and very fond of the ridiculous. To keep him happy, his advisors demanded that everyone who attended the ball wear something as strange as they possibly could, or be forced to wear nothing at all. So of course everyone important everywhere set their seamstresses to work designing and making clothes more ridiculous than anything anyone had ever seen. A great many strange things were made. The ball came and the ball went, with the king's pleasure, and all those horribly odd clothes they had made were hung away with an air of shame and good-riddance. They never wore them again." She licked her lips excitedly, her cheeks flushed bright red. Her hand was warm and soft, still pressed across my mouth.

"Now jump ahead about seven hundred years," she went on. "Everyone who was at that ridiculous party dead, and their children have inherited all at last. And what do those children find when they go a-searching through their parents' wardrobes? All the hideous, ridiculous, terrible clothes made for that long-ago ball, of course! Only, being elves and thus unable to conceive of their ancestors having done something to be embarrassed of, these children-elves think that their parents had been holding out on them and that _those _were the kinds of clothes they wore all the time in their youth! And so the fools start _wearing _them to all kinds of evening soirees and banquets, and turn the indulgence of one fickle king's idle entertainment into a societal trend of fashion fully worthy to embarrass their ancestors for all time!"

She dissolved into giggles, falling back against her chair and holding her hands over her own mouth instead of mine. Ildonis shook his head wryly, laughing.

"Well that's a story, all right," he said, eyes squeezed into dark lines by his broad smile. "Good entertainment, no doubt, but not particularly likely to be true."

"Right," agreed Alusan. "After all, the clothes would have rotted away long before the parents had died."

"What?" gasped Odfrin, lowering her hands and staring across the table at the dark man. "Oh no, no! Not at all! Elven clothes last forever."

The Redguard cocked an eyebrow at her, lips twisting slowly in a grin. "You're not being serious, right? Cute sarcasm."

The Nord shook her golden curls vehemently. "No, really," she pressed earnestly. "Elven clothes don't decay. They last forever, barring someone burning them or cutting them up (which, really, is a problem with some of the lower classes). That's why they use byssus, didn't you know? Their sea-silk is so valuable because it literally _never _fades or falls. It is eternal. Which is useful if you're an elf expecting to live close on 1000 years."

"Really?" Miles asked wonderingly. Ciene watched in silence, eyebrows raised curiously.

"But wait, wait," I broke in as Odfrin began to speak. "That makes no sense. Why would the elves put so much effort into the production of byssus _now _if it essentially doesn't need to be replenished? They're not exporting it, so what do they need it for, if this is true?"

Alusan and Ildonis frowned in thoughtful contemplation of the point, but Odfrin just shrugged and gave a little laugh. "I don't know about that," she said, "but I'm telling you, that yes, yes, yes, it lasts forever! Those clothes out there, they could be the _exact specimens _from that ball. It's not unlikely at all, especially considering that it really is normal for elves to wear their parents' clothes for their _entire lives_."

"Is it?" I said, at a bit of a loss for words at this sudden gushing rush of knowledge – as was the rest of the group, judging by their wide eyes and raised brows.

"Of course," Odfrin answered with a perfunctory nod. "And it's a bit scary, if I'm truthful." Her voice lowered to a hushed murmur. "Because they don't all fit, you know? I've heard that some of them go to extreme measures, when that happens. Cutting bones and stretching sinews, just to fit into daddy's old work robes."

Ciene shuddered. "Oh, I am glad I'm not an elf," she said quietly. "My mother was a foot and a half taller than I am."

We shook our heads in unanimous agreement and silent wonder, staring out at the surrounding elves with their cold, distant faces, their bizarre attire, their high, sonorous chit-chat and their tall, mouth staining goblets of strange white liquor, marveling that such a strange people truly existed. I know that I marveled at it, anyway; I have seen many things in this world, but never anything close to the extremity of bizarre as that present in the Altmer of Alinor.

As we stirred our separate boggled musings and finished up the last jarring morsels of the _inventive _Altmeri meal, silence fell upon us; the silence of sensual enjoyment, as we took what pleasure we could from the food; the silence of baffled wonder as we marveled more and more over the strangeness of the elves; the silence of lip-bitten coquetry as Odfrin, who seemed to have recovered fully from her bout of sadness, squeezed my hand beneath the table and winked at me playfully, a naughty spark in her eyes; the silence of soft, basking appreciation and relief as I smiled back at my recovered Nord, wearing as much of my flirtatious-face as I could. I was not so convincing as I could have been in that, I think; I was too relieved to have her back to normal to put much effort into enticement. She seemed satisfied anyway, though; she wrapped her arms around one of mine when she had finished her last bite of venison pie, nestling snuggly up against my side. There's nothing quite like having a woman cuddled up to you like that; nothing quite like feeling her head on your shoulder, her breasts against your arm, her fingers in your palm tracing soft twirls. And there's no woman quite like Odfrin, in all her softness and sweetness, her beauty and her love. To have her with me that day, to have her at my side, touching me, teasing me, loving me, was a blessing for which I could never have reasonably wished. And I was not oblivious to the honor. I was not oblivious to the honor.


	16. Chapter 15

**AN: AN: Big thanks to Kourumi for drawing so much wonderful concept clothing art for me! Go see it!**

kourumi . deviantart gallery / 37234001  


**Chapter XV**

Every plate lay cleaned; every pitcher slumped hollow; every crockery sprawled sampled and scraped; the napkins retired, the plates unemployed, the cutlery at rest, and its employers slumped in stuffed luxury-laze in their warm wooden seats, smiling tiny smiles of contentment round at each other. There was no thought of elves in us, then; no thought for the watching gallery above and below and all around our tiger-eyed platform, but only for each other; our soft, tender little community seeped sleepily together in the midst of elven ignorance. And happy for it.

"Ahhhh," Ildonis sighed, linking his hands together across his brown-robed belly. "Well, that's something. Bit jarring going down, but once it's there it sits quite nicely."

"Mmm," agreed Miles. The Nibenean sat slumped across his chair, feet thrown carelessly up on the table, staring up at the dark ceiling high above, one arm slung comfortably around Ciene's shoulders so that her head nestled snug with his. "Mmm," he repeated, and settled deeper into his chair, and Ciene's side. Ciene watched him blankly for a moment. Then one thin arm pulled out from between them to wrap around and lay across his emerald-robed chest, rubbing hesitantly. Miles smiled, and laid a hand across hers.

"It is filling," Alusan agreed belatedly, rubbing his belly through his white robes. He stretched with a sigh and let his arm fall down around the shoulders of the Khajiit at his side. "Warm, too. Soporific."

"Lazies!" laughed Odfrin, twinkling her eyes round the table. "What kind of party is this?"

"Slumber," Tsabhi purred, snuggling her head back against Alusan.

"I wouldn't get too comfortable," Ildonis murmured. "Look who's back." He gestured upward with a flick of his fingers.

Our shy server had returned. He stood, quivering madly, on the platform above, surrounded once more by his many portable tables, sagging against his long silver pole for support. I would swear his teeth were chattering.

"What?" Miles murmured, half-rousing, but falling immediately back at Ciene's resistance. "Dessert?" he asked hopefully as he patted the Breton's cheek.

"Huh. I wouldn't have expected it." The Redguard sighed out the words slowly, clearly with only half his attention outside of anything except the Khajiit purring up at him and rubbing her face against his chest.

Odfrin let out a little scoff. "Boring! What happened to make you all so boring?"

"Elves," answered Ciene quietly, looking down into Miles' eyes and half-smiling. "'Elves' is always the answer."

"Well maybe _you _lot don't want any dessert," the Nord exclaimed, "but _I _do! Tell him to hurry up, Jon!" she said, turning to blink those wide pale eyes up at me. "I want to see what they have, at least. Ask him to start serving."

"Better not," Ildonis warned. "You saw what happened before. You'll never get anything at all if Jon makes the poor pansy pee his skirts."

Odfrin frowned. "Good point. Jon, don't make him pee. I'll handle this. Oh, hello there elf!" she began, sitting up and waving as she cried out. "Yes, you there, elf! Dish-boy! Do go ahead and start, won't you? We're quite ready!"

"Oh no," I muttered, shaking my head. "Oh dear."

"What?" the Nord whispered, swinging her head round to frown up at me. "I'm being very nice! He shouldn't be scared by that."

"He shouldn't," I agreed. "He shouldn't be frightened of you in any way. But then, he doesn't understand a word you're saying, so maybe he should. At any rate, he most certainly _is. _Look at the poor fellow."

His eyes had bulged to near perfect spheres as Odfrin spoke, white showing all the way around the dilation-devoured cornea gold-glints; his skin was a sickly, pale yellow; his hands spasmed on his silver support, ridged in tendons; his knees wobbled visibly through his ring-centered robes. The sharp tips of his long elven ears trembled with his body's overstrung tension.

"Oh, dear," Odfrin said, vexed. "You're right. He is. He's afraid of me. Why is he afraid of me? I was nice to him! Why is he afraid of me when I'm nice? I don't understand these prissy pieces of –"

"Shhh," I whispered. "Quiet for the performance. He's starting, despite it all."

With a visible gulping mustering of courage, the elf straightened his spine and pushed away from his crutch. Hands shaking, he set about affixing the hook to some invisible dish, then hoisted the whole thing into the air. We watched in mingled sloth and impatience; the gallery ignored the proceedings entirely, never varying in its high, cold hum. The pole extended, and a narrow white bit of fluted porcelain settled softly down on the table. The elf's face glistened with nervousness the whole time; his hands slipped in sweat on the pole. A second bit of mysterious crockery plopped itself down before us, bobbing and waving through the air for a good five minutes before its successful arrival. As the third made its ponderous path downward, Odfrin's patience broke.

"Ohhh, this is taking too long," she muttered. "Too long. So slow. Scared of me, are you? Ha! Fine, then. I don't need you anyway. Just watch." And to our eye-popping horror, her pale, plump little hand twirled its graceful way through the air, and a selcouth flock of dishware came flapping down to the gleaming tabletop, sweeping before it its precedents as it alighted in a graceful point-head formation.

The chamber choked on sudden silence. Without pause, without equilibration, without exclamation, every single elf cut sharply off their dinners, their conversations, their songs, and their sneers to turn their cruel golden eyes and harsh bony faces down, glaring, on us. They stared, mouths set in identical sharp, thin-lipped lines, brows ridged in 'v' vectored fury as only elven brows can be ridged. An array of affront; an entire gallery of silent censure.

A single keening wail cut the silence like a warbling wire; the server-elf sunk to his knees with his arms wrapped tight around his head, wobbling avolitionally back and forth behind his ring of folding tables.

"Oh dear," I murmured softly as I could. "Oh dear dear dear." The gallery's lips tightened a collective fraction.

A sudden flicker of movement caught my eye; the womer upon whose hideous sea-shell dress Alusan had remarked had stood abruptly, her face contorted into terrible, demonic rage, like golden wire twisted taught around a bare, monstrous skull. She glared down, not at us, but at the fierce-eyed womer beside her, at the focal point of the Thalmori parabola.

"Now do you see?" Her Altmeri shriek echoed through the chamber like the singing of sorrows highest bell. "See what the Thalmor has caused with its cretinous insistence upon this travesty! The innor tori will _never _come clean!" Her voice spiked higher. "Never! This manifold is useless, now, thanks to you. You might as well use it to kennel your next batch of peritrichous pets, but any _self-respecting _citizen would consign it to cleavage!" The hideous face screwed even tighter. The Thalmor just watched, calm and composed but incredibly intense. Her eyes burned. "You have cost me Real Estate, you! So I am done humoring your outrageous requests and pandering to your sick little fantasies! Our agreements we maintain, but all our dealings henceforth shall be strictly impersonal; I am sick of your demands. That to you!" The womer snatched up her crystal goblet and poured its viscous white contents out, into the Thalmor's plate. Then she swung around and stampeded away through a high, narrow arch in the gallery's wall. The mer at the Thalmor's other side bent to whisper in her pointed ear, then drew his thin body up to its froth-veiled full height and, with dignified, prodigious strides, set off after the womer.

"Do you know," Miles spoke into the silence, looking wide-eyed down the table toward Odfrin, who had somehow remained completely oblivious to the entire scene and was busying herself happily with a thorough investigation of the dishes she had purloined, "I may be mistaken, but… well, I rather think you did something they didn't like, Odfrin."

We shuddered with incredulous, nervous laughter. The Nord just smiled and went on with her poking and peering and cautious sampling. I shook my head wonderingly, leaning forward to look over at Miles.

"What do you think they'll do?" I whispered. "Those were some insulting words, let me tell you. Think the Thalmor will retaliate?"

"Dunno," answered Miles with a shrug from Ciene's arms. "Doesn't look like it, though."

And indeed it did not. The Thalmori focus had not erupted in fountains of ire, had not frothed sudden vengeance, had not hissed polity-sheathed threats, had not even stirred herself to furious conversation. No; the Thalmor leader simply stared at us with those hard, piercing eyes blazing in her blade-bare face, _smiling _a tiny, satisfied smile. Her mouth twitched with cragged shadows. She looked away momentarily; spoke quietly around to her colleagues. The same cold, cruel smile spread on their lips as well, and as one they lifted clear crystal goblets half or a quarter full with thick white liquid, raised them toward our table, and drank, eyes never straying from us over the rims of their goblets.

"Oh," I let out. "Oh that's not good. That's not good at all." The goblets dropped, and fifteen long, pink tongues slithered out to swipe away the lines of white from fifteen golden upper lips. From the end of the line, Aatheril's eyetooth winked out at us from his lopsided grin.

"No," agreed Alusan grimly, stiff in his seat. "No, it most definitely is not." His dark mouth hardened to a saber's black slash.

"Good gods," Miles said, starting in Ciene's arms and staring in belated realization as the Thalmor filed in stark-staggered steps out of the gallery. "Did they just - ? They did! The Thalmor _toasted _us." He gave his red-haired head a little shake, blinking bemusedly.

"That they did," Ildonis agreed. "But I'm afraid I don't appreciate the honor."

"_Why _would they do that?" I wondered. "The Thalmor hate us."

Alusan grunted grimly. "Perhaps," he mused, his eyes shards of obsidian, "because we have served our purpose."

_That _sent a dark dawning round the table. I saw Tsabhi shiver and draw closer to her Redguard for comfort from the implications.

"Purpose…" I breathed. "Gods, but that's a scary thought. What _purpose _would drive the Thalmor to allow us in their precious sanctuary?"

"Roundabout espionage," suggested Ildonis. "Perhaps they toasted us for having flushed out a dissident." Which was reasonable enough to be answered only with a round of high-eyebrowed nods and weighing frowns. We stared down at the table for a time, lost in in thought – except for Odfrin, of course, who was still busy with her dessert dishes. The elves around us began, slowly, to settle back in to their oblivious dinners, content, I suppose, that we had realized their intended tacit chastisement. The high hum of their conversation buzzed steadily back into being.

Tsabhi's low, rolling voice spoke up. "_What _was it these Thalmor drank for their toast, any road? So white, so thick. Tsabhi did not see this thing before, if it is not the milkings of some beast. Tsabhi does not think these elves would drink beast-suck, though."

"Oh, didn't I tell you about that?" Odfrin answered, replacing the lid of a final crock and jumping without warning back into interaction. "They're milk-drinkers, all right, and quintessentially, though of course since they're _elves _it's not really milk the way we'd normally think of it. I don't know where it _does _come from, but I know it's not from cows. It's called 'amrita,' and it's the staple beverage all over this bloody island. All of them drink it, the white-lipped babes eternal. Sure, there is wine and water and a few other things, but they're not in high favor; 'amrita' is above all else."

"Amrita," I repeated, tasting the word. "Have you had it, Odfrin? What's it like?"

The Nord shook her golden curls vigorously. "No, of course I haven't had it; it's quite forbidden to anyone except the elves. And I'm certainly not jealous; do I look like a milk-drinker to you? And I'm going to tell you all something now," she went on without pause, fixing us each in turn with an intense, vibrant blue stare. "You've been a-talking and a-speculating, but talk and speculation on _that _front only leads you down the danger-straits. They can keep their white slop; there are no milk-drinkers among _us. _And no reason to mourn and mope over that, either; we have _us, _remember?"

"Quite right," Ildonis rumbled, his round face pressing tight and red in an indulgent smile. "Quite right indeed. So, I say, let's have a look at these desserts our Odfrin put our hosts into such a tizzy over."

Odfrin caught the man's hand as it reached out for the lid of a warped crystal pan. "Well, and no, I'm afraid," the Nord said, blushing. "I've gone through them all quite thoroughly, and – well, none are edible. None even come close to being edible."

"How so?"

Odfrin fixed the Imperial with a flat look. "You don't want to know, Ildonis," she said. "You really, really don't."

"But that's all all right," she went on brightly, releasing the man's hand and beaming white teeth and dimples round at us. "So we don't have a dessert – who needs it? We have something better; us. So we don't have amrita – who cares? I found something much, _much _better than mer-milk. Look at this." She snatched five tall, dark, dusty bottles from the tabletop and passed them around, nearly dancing in her seat with barely suppressed smugness.

"Wine?" said Miles, perking up as Ciene held the bottle before him. "Well that's – wait! Is that a _Skingrad _vintage?"

"It is!" Ildonis exclaimed, swiping a fat thumb through the dust to reveal a cracked and faded paper label. "4E 37. Good gods. This is a treasure."

"Damn straight it is!" Miles gasped, sitting up and cradling the bottle in his arms like a child. "They can't _grow _grapes like that anymore. Literally; there was some intense fire or something a century or so ago, and the grapes have never been the same since. Completely ruined the horticultural industry in the region. Something to do with the molds, I think."

"Who cares about that? Just pour me some bloody wine already!" growled Alusan eagerly.

"Pouring," Miles answered promptly, popping the waxy cork out onto our platform's gleaming, tiger-eyed floor. "Oh, but you did well, Odfrin, in getting this," he went on as he tipped the dusty bottle over Alusan's extended goblet.

"Yes, I did," she said primly, with a smug smile. I chuckled under my breath and gave her hand a little squeeze.

When we had all had our goblets and our mouths filled at least once, and sat savoring the unexpected blessing of fine alcohol without tension or pretense under the averted eyes of three hundred elves, Ciene spoke up suddenly from her snuggled spot under Miles' arm.

"You know what this means, right?" she said quietly, blinking down at the table, her dark eyes only occasionally flickering up to look at Odfrin or me. "There are five bottles. The elves will probably throw out whatever we don't drink. That is impermissible."

"I think I see where this is going…" the red-haired Imperial at her side said with a grin.

The Breton nodded. "Yes. We're going to leave here completely and utterly boozed out of our minds."

And we must have done, for I really cannot remember. Most of the rest of that night is a blur of uproarious laughter and half-comprehensible high-strung tales, of outrageous dares and secrets shared under the lock of drink, of warm bodies and fumbling, frantic caresses. I remember Miles stuffing his robes full of the candles we had collected until he fairly prickled with wax and wicks, and Ciene falling over him in laughter and nearly tearing her dress to shreds in the doing; Alusan breaking his rogue's reserve and shock us all with a table-top demonstration of the hip-sliding and belly-rolling dances of the Alik'r Desert; Ildonis erupting like a Black Marsh bullfrog into bellowing, croaking song, and getting splattered in the head after ten minutes of it by a pastry thrown by one of the more impulsive elves in the gallery high above; Ciene giggling and stumbling and brilliantly pink and clashing with her dress from the bosom up as she pinched Miles' bottom on our way across the chatoyant floor; Odfrin grinning fit to dimple her way to the moons and tripping over the hem of her creamy skirt so much that I was quite forced to scoop her up in my arms and let her giggle-kisses tickle my chest. I remember the long, song-straddled slip-stream tug-a-long line that was our parade back through the laundress' mirror-warped ward, as I remember the bulging bug eyes and crisply-tripped retreats of the hair-appareled womer, but nothing of how we left the gallery's specimen pedestal and came to act as their terrors. I remember an impromptu slapdash tap dance on the empty loading docks' grey metal, and a long mull-moaning wait for the Thalmori carriages to come leopard-slinking up the narrow alley, the lot of us lined lengthwise against the building, head to foot, moaning mock mourning and flailing sluggish drunken limbs, but nothing of the carriage's actual arrival, its driver's particular brand of strained and slouching indifference at the sight of us, or of our indubitably terrifying tumbling mangle of drink-sodden limbs as we splattered ourselves along – and eventually inside – the arch-backed walls of his hiss-browed conveyance. I remember nothing of the ride save a brief burst of boisterous rebellion-banging about the walls and floors, an abrupt bumble down into the black coziness of drunken doze, and then a long smooth blur of tangled limb-bundlings and warm shadow-shapes butting and budding soft sighs against each other, ignored snores roaring in the gloom's depths under the black on black silhouettes' subtle sighs and partnered pants. The city's twists and tangles and striated lightnings went quite unnoticed in our dark drunkard's cocoon.

And likewise I do not remember how we made our way from our carriage-cluster out and back to our amber nest of Embassy; whether we ran, or crawled, or triplet-slid up the stairs and stole the driver's slant-hat as we went. But what I do remember is blinking slight sobriety – relatively speaking, of course – in the depths of the divan in the Embassy's dim ochre murk, a solid warmth pressed snug across my lap, and silky fingers twining slowly through my hair. The clay mug of steaming black bean brew in my hand must have cut the liquor's latch on my brain, for I could blink about at the dimly-lit room without its swimming or swirling overmuch around me.

Much the same with my friends as with me, I saw; suffused in warmth, wordless contentment, and the comfort of a simple heart beating; Ildonis slumped in his throne with eyes half-closed and mouth slightly smiling, a huge bowl of brew poised precariously on his belly, staring happily down into the low lattice-fire; Tsabhi's pervasive purr curling around us like her tail around Alusan's fingers and her body across his lap in the wide papasan, rubbing her cheek slowly against his chest; Ciene and Miles stretched shamelessly out on the settee and kissing soft and slow with eyes closed, the Breton's tiny hands pressing and pulling and rubbing the redhead's body closer down into her own. That enthusiasm surprised me momentarily, I remember, but then a flash from the return-ride recurred, of a straddling shadow across the Nibenean's lap, and I struck a line through my suspicions about the girl. She'd simply been a little shy.

Odfrin's hand tightened in my mussed hair, massaging my skull and turning my head from the kissing couple, down to her low-lidded eyes and lush bosom, her mane of tawny frizz spread across the cushioned arm of the divan, like amber thyme across rocks in a dewy morning garden. She slid a slow look sideways at the pant-partnered pair, and then bit a sultry smirk up at me.

"Remind me to remember not to forget," she said in a voice of quiet, womanly depth as she pressed me closer down toward her mouth, "that it won't be necessary to look after little Ciene after all. She's got a man to fill her nights, now."

"Men are good for that," I whispered back. The Nord blinked once. Her dimples deepened. "A pity there's not one around to fill yours. Remind me to remember not to forget to find you someone to take care of _you_, in the absence."

Her pupils widened. "Oh, I'm not looking for a man," she said. "I need something… bigger. Stronger." A hand drew flush up my side, rubbing slowly. "Something… hairier." Slim fingers tugged at the black silk of my cravat, and slipped inside my robes to rifle caresses through my fur, to squeeze my pectoral approvingly. "Something lumpy. Like an ox." The hand withdrew. "Something virile. Like a bull." Her touch slithered down my chest.

My eyes slid shut and my head drooped down onto her neck. Her fingers worked me like an overenthusiastic cattle-breeder at market. I huffed hot heaves onto her throat. She chuckled lowly, and the sound vibrated through both our bodies.

"I'm looking for a stud," she said at last, pulling me up by the hair with one hand to meet her dilated eyes and caressing my stubble-rough cheek with the other. "Think you can find one for me?"

"Ugh," was all I could manage; a low, rough grunt. And yet her eyes both widened and darkened, and I felt her pulse quicken in the wrist pressed against my tingling jaw.

I collected a few more of my wits. "Madame," I said deeply, pulling back a few inches, "I know of a beast that might suit your needs. A rutting beast."

"Rutting?" she murmured. "Mmm… I like that." She pushed me back further, sitting up straight herself and swinging her legs off my lap. "I have a heifer in mind to match his rut with her heat. Don't forget to remember not to let me forget to show you to her – I mean, you to her – sometime. After you've delivered the bull, of course." She rose smoothly, sliding a hand down the muslin along the back of her thigh, her face expressionless save for the desire-dilation of her pale eyes.

"Very well," I replied quietly, intently. "But _you _must not forget to remember to tell me to which address the beast should be delivered, and when."

One brilliantly pale eyebrow rose. "The situation is quite urgent. Delay could be disastrous. As for the address… I advise you to follow your…" her eyes flickered down to my lap, "… nose. Good night, Jon."

She sauntered away through the ochre gloom without another word, just a silent wave to Ildonis as she swayed slowly up the steps to her room's high shard of a door. Her creamy muslin clung to her curves with the lushness of a ripe peach. She glanced back as she reached the door, catching my mesmerized eye over her bare, blushing shoulder. Then she vanished, with the slip of a latch.

I stared for a long time at the door where she had stood. My heart thudded bass drum booms in my ears.

"Jon," groaned Ildonis with a sudden croak, as I struggled with my trembling insides. One of the big man's eyes opened wide to peer pink-rimmed bleariness down at me. "Jon, that was a fuck-me walk."

"What?" gasped Ciene breathlessly, disengaging from Miles' mouth with a pop. The Nibenean was unfazed; his red head bent immediately to suckle at the Breton's thin, blue-veined throat. Her eyes fluttered momentarily, but she stared up at Ildonis regardless past her lover's shoulder.

"Thank you, Ildonis," I coughed dryly, belying my leaping stomach. "I hadn't noticed."

"Watchin' out for ya. That's me." The Imperial gave an exaggerated nod. "Yer not gonna pass it up, are yer?" For all his size, the man truly did not hold his liquor.

"What is there to pass up in a walk?" I answered smoothly, though my heart raced the ring of my ribs. I stood. "But I think me Odfrin and I have yet some things left unsaid, for this evening. Given the level of our intoxication, it would probably behoove us both to say them now while we still remember not to forget. I think I shall do so, and then to bed myself. Good night to you all."

"That's one way to put it," Ildonis mused. "Not sure how the metaphor really works right now, but it's one way to put it. Fare well in your metaphor, Jon." He waved a huge hand sleepily, then buried his rubicund nose in the enormous mug on his belly for a long, slurping sip.

"Night, Jon," Alusan murmured deeply as I passed his broad, round chair. I patted the man's shoulder silently.

"Kiss the little kitten for this one," Tasbhi purred, stirring and stretching comfortably on the Redguard's chest.

"I will," I answered quietly with a wry smile and a shake of my head. "Good night, all of you." I gave them all one last glance; Ildonis slumped and slipped abruptly into slumber, his fat chin cushioned on the rim of his mug; Alusan and Tsabhi cuddled cozily together; Ciene's little body squirming beneath Miles' emerald robes on the wide bull-patterned settee; her wide, dark eyes staring blankly up at me past his shoulder. I held that gaze for a long moment. Then I smiled, and winked, and turned away up the inset of stairs to Odfrin's waiting door. I did not hesitate. I did not knock. I lifted the latch with a soft click, and slipped in to the room of woman.

She had dimmed the lights even lower than the main chamber's; the room was veiled in draped shadows and sheets slung-hung from a criss-crossery of metal rafters. The lattice-fires lining the long walls glowed diffuse yellow through the tangled curtain scraps. That was Odfrin's room; narrow but deep and high, sloping gentle steps up to the four-postered bed at its far end, the path warded by archways of sheer, tattered cloth in every pattern and texture and color imaginable, from threadbare rug to torn towel to shredded nightgown to lust-ripped lingerie, backlit in the warm tones of a fire near slumber. I had seen it before, but only momentarily. Odfrin encouraged us to approach her, of course, but there was something in her manner that said her chamber was a private, personal place for her, that she would let us know when she wished us to join her there. The fact that she had, had let _me _know that she wanted _me _there with her in her muffled and shrouded retreat, _me, _sent the hairs on my arms on ecstatic edge.

Sound stroked my ears; low humming, deep, womanly, and slow, swaying down the room's shallow steps. I traced it back to the far platform, smiling a helpless smile of love for the woman who would sing thus to herself. I could feel the skin all over my body pulse as my heart kept time with her song in that warm dimness. I pushed aside a strip of silk as I gained the last step – and there she was, sitting soft and sweet on a little wooden stool, her fingers tangled in a lazy, absentminded cat's cradle as she stared off into the summer's dusk gloom that was the backlit curtain shroud of her tall wooden wardrobe, the bed at her side a massive mound of bunched blankets, twisted sheets, bulging, multilayered curtains, piled pillows, and curled goose-down comforters. She was completely naked.

I stepped silently up behind her; slid a hand through her bushy golden frizz and onto her soft shoulder. She looked up and back to meet my eye, completely unsurprised.

"Hello," she whispered. Her face was yellow moon glow and murk, her pale eyes twinkling like stars or the glimmer of a horse's gaze.

"Hello, Odfrin," I replied softly.

Her fingers pulled lingeringly out from the cradle's twines. "You're in my room, Jon."

"I am," I agreed. I laid my other hand on her shoulder, squeezing, massaging the taut muscle.

"What are you looking for?" she went on. She turned back to face her curtain-shrouded wardrobe once more, leaning back against me. Her head was pillowed on my waist.

"Love," I answered simply.

A long moment, pregnant in the dark. I let my hands slide, trailing broad fingertips, down her round white arms. They prickled in my wake.

"I have that," she answered, at last.

"You _have _it?" I murmured with a deep chuckle. "No, I don't think you do, Odfrin. I've – I've been watching you, and that's what has amazed me the most continually. That you don't _have _love – you _are _love."

She stirred in my hands. "What do you mean?"

"I mean – that I've never seen anyone give of themselves the way you do," I mumbled through the heart suddenly pounding choked nervousness in my throat. "I've never seen anyone adopt another being with as much eagerness and delight as you have adopted us these last few weeks. I've never seen anyone with so much caring, so much acceptance for our humanity. I've never seen anyone adapt themselves to individual relationships the way you do. You're – you're incredible, Odfrin. And I know I speak for all of us when I say that. You have given us so much. You make our lives here worth living. You embraces us as we are. You fill us with love. You _are _love. Where would we be without you?"

She said nothing. I did not expect her to. I gripped her arms gently, drew her to her bare, short-toed feet; pulled her back against me, flush with the line of my body, and let my hands drape down to the swell of her smooth belly.

"So when I say that I want love," I whispered into her dawn-tangled frizz, "you know what I really mean. I want you. I want Love."

The woman twisted against me; spun about in my arms to blink up with eyes shining with pale star-stream. Her hands bunched in the sleeves of my robes, and her chest flushed mottled pink over her milk-skin's moon-glow.

"Jon," she whispered.

"Odfrin."

"Jon," she repeated, her voice dwindled so low I had to step closer and bend my head down toward her trembling mouth to hear. Her hands flexed convulsively in my sleeves. "Jon, I want you too." And then she pressed her open mouth to mine and sealed her soft curves to my flesh, and for a long time all was said tongue to tongue, hip to hip, skin to skin; all was frantic hands and flushed flesh, tumbling and tangling of coiling limbs and breathless gasps; all clenching and arching, pushing and pressing, licking and laughing, rolling and roiling, blood boiling high and hotter and closer beneath sweat-slick skin, pulsing and pounding the tattoo of silenced song through our tiger-twined bodies. All was musk and milky flesh; all was Love.

And as we lay together afterward, blinking and breathing in the intertwined tangle of sheets and blankets and pillows and limbs that was Odfrin's bed, nestled and snuggled and cuddled down into its soft embrace, our bodies still flushed and sweaty, all was comfort, contentment, and connection.

"Mmmmmmm," Odfrin hummed against my chest, running a hand through my dark, curled fur and rubbing her cheek against my pectoral. "Mmmmm. Loooovely."

"Yes, you are," I murmured down to her, and squeezed her close.

"I haven't – in a long time, you know," she said, smiling a sultry smile. "It's good to have a man. There's nothing like a good man. And you are _quite _the man." She giggled into my side.

"Well, thank you," I replied with a bemused smile. "I think. I'm not sure why it merits a laugh of that sort, though."

She bit her lip, holding back another giggle. "Oh, it's nothing bad. Just that you are _quite _the man, indeed. Almost more than a man, really."

"What? What _are _you talking about?"

She pressed her face down to my chest, unable to suppress her laughter. "It's – it's just -" she managed, "well, I'm _leaking seed. _A lot."

"Oh." My face heated. "Sorry. That always happens. It's just how I am."

"Oh, don't apologize!" she exclaimed. "It's fine. Hot, actually. I just – never knew it could happen. As I said, you're simply _quite _the man. Or quite the bull, anyway."

I chuckled, shaking my head. "A bull, am I?"

"Oh yes. A _stud _bull. And clearly in the rut."

I turned on my side to face her fully. "A stud in rut needs ridden quite often, you know," I said. "Or he becomes... agitated."

"We can't have that," she replied lowly, biting her underlip. "Luckily I know a -"

"Odfrin?"

The timid female voice cut the Nord's soft words and caresses both. She sat up abruptly, pulling a bunched sheet up to her chest.

"Odfrin?" the voice came again, soft and unsure. "Odfrin – are you awake?"

"One moment, Ciene," she called. "I will be right there." She rummaged hurriedly through the mass of bedding, finding the ends of the sheet she held and shaking it out to wrap around her body. I reached out to trail my fingers down the underside of one smooth arm.

"Leaving?" I murmured.

She paused in her flurry of rearrangement to grin down at me, her face shadowed and soft in the dim diffuse light, golden hair massively frizzed and tangled from our love. "I'll be back," she said, patting my cheek. "Don't go anywhere, my bull."

She climbed out of our hollowed nest of blankets and off the bed, pulling her covering sheet along, held up at her shoulder with one hand. I flipped onto my back with a contented sigh, staring up at the four-poster's yellow silk ceiling and stretching my arms languorously above my head. I still couldn't quite believe how lucky I had been. I still can't.

"Yes, Ciene?" I heard Odfrin whisper a moment later. "What is it? Is something wrong?"

"Umm, no, nothing's wrong," the Breton's voice replied, surprisingly small and scared. "I just wanted to see you."

"Oh, Ciene," Odfrin replied with a sweet sigh, "I do love you ever so much." A long pause, as though for an embrace. "You're sure there's nothing you wanted to talk about?" the Nord went on.

"Well…" Ciene hesitated. "Well, I was just wondering… you know, how you once said…" She trailed off with a convulsive gulp. Curious, I flipped myself onto my belly and wriggled my way to the edge of the bed, dimpling a gap in the blankets and comforters with my chest to look down on the shrouded rest of the room.

The two women stood kiss-close together, halfway down the room's shallow steps. Odfrin's clutched sheet-shroud trailed all the way back to the foot of the bed. She gleamed marble moonlight where the drape dipped; round arms, sinuous spine, full bottom. Ciene, with her sleek helmet of hair mussed and messy, still in her scarlet satin but with a good few buttons undone by her man of the evening and gaping on a pale, blue-veined bosom, rubbed the back of one bare foot against her calf as she blinked nervously up at the Nord.

"What did I say?" asked Odfrin curiously, blinking down at the Breton. Her fingers slipped on the sheet, and gave the tiny woman a quick glimpse of breasts before hitching back into place.

"You said… if we ever needed… _help _with anything, we should come see you. No matter what it was." She gulped again, and stared down shyly at her clenching little toes, rubbing her arm.

"What do you need help with, Ciene?" Odfrin asked seriously. "Mmm?" the Breton answered only with a convulsive swallow and a tremble of her thin shoulders.

"Ciene," Odfrin repeated, her voice lowering and softening even further. One hand rose to tip the tiny woman's pale face up to her own. "What do you need from me, Ciene?"

"I – I need –" the Breton gasped. Her huge dark eyes stared, mesmerized, into Odfrin's pale glimmer. "I need you to – to –" She shuddered, and her eyes flickered momentarily away from the moon-milky Nord, up instead toward the bed, toward the amber-gloomed mess that was the nightly nest of Odfrin's flesh, toward where I lay quietly watching and listening – and caught, abruptly, on my own. We watched each other for an instant that seemed like eternity. Then I smiled softly, and she snapped back towards Odfrin.

"I need you to tell me what to do about Miles," she let out in a rush.

A delighted smile flashed momentarily across Odfrin's lips as she released the Breton's face, but she quickly reined it in.

"Miles?" she said. "What about him? You certainly seem to be handling him well to me."

"Oh _no,_" answered Ciene in her tiny, timid voice, shaking her head so that her disarrayed helmet hair flared through the air. "I don't have _any idea _what I'm doing. I've – I've never had sex with a man, Odfrin. I don't know what he wants."

"He wants you," the Nord replied simply. "That's all. It's all men ever want, really. To have you; for a minute, an hour, a week, a lifetime. Underneath everything else in a man's feelings for a woman is that: a bare, inexplicable wanting. He wants you, as you are, in his arms and in his bed. That's all." She ran a hand across the Breton's scalp, smoothing down her hair. "Don't worry about disappointing him. The only real way to dissatisfy a man is to say – or show – that he has you when he doesn't, not really. Everything else stems from that. Besides, _I _couldn't tell that you've never known love, so why should he? Men – _most _men – are remarkably thick about that sort of thing. But he wouldn't care even if he knew; he'd be honored to be your first. I say that with certainty; I know Miles."

Ciene bit her lip, not meeting the Nord's eyes. "Yes, but – but I'm not sure I'm ready for him," she said. "I'm not sure I want – a man." She shuffled a half step closer. Her eyes flashed darkly toward me.

"Oh, my dear one," Odfrin sighed deeply, pressing the Breton's head to her breast, "you will never be sure you're ready for a man until you have had one. So test him out. Sleep with him. Take him for a ride. I think you'll find that it's sort of a joy ride." She stepped back, running her hands down Ciene's satin-sleeved arms.

"So that's what you want me to do?" Ciene said after a pause. Her words were suddenly, crisply exact. "Sleep with him? Let him – have me?"

"I think it's what _you _want," Odfrin replied. "You've been looking for someone to hold you for a while, Ciene, whether you knew it or not. I think you found one."

"Yes," whispered the Breton, "I had had that thought myself." She fell silent, and the pair stood together for a long moment; Odfrin watching the little woman's dark eyes, and Ciene staring down at the floor. Then the Breton stirred, almost briskly.

"Thank you for your advice and understanding, Odfrin," she said. "I'm sure Miles will appreciate it."

"No," Odfrin replied, "he'll appreciate _you._ And there's not much better than that."

"I suppose not… however little we might realize it. Good night, Odfrin."

"Good night, dear," the Nord replied, and bent to pull her into a hug – but a tiny hand shot up to her pale round cheek, and pulled her down to the Breton's mouth instead. And Ciene kissed Odfrin softly in the dark.

"What was that for?" The Nord whispered curiously when they had separated.

"To show my thanks," the Breton answered, turning away. "To let you taste my appreciation. But good night, Odfrin. I must – to be bedded."

The marble moon statue watched silently as the little woman retreated down the broad steps, swaying in her scarlet satin. The door-shard split, spilling oily light, and then sealed. And Odfrin turned slowly to climb back up to her bed, and to me.

"Do you think she'll be all right?" I whispered as she drew to a halt close before the mounded mattress.

"I… think so," she answered softly. She let the sheet drip down into a puddle around her feet, and threaded her fingers through my hair. "You didn't hear all of that, did you? I don't know that she'd be comfortable with you in on our girl talk."

I wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her flush against the bed and pressing my face against her smooth belly. Her fingers tightened.

"I heard it," I mumbled into her flesh. "I may not have the best eyesight in Tamriel, but I do hear. I think it's all right, though. She knew I was here. She saw me before she even got started, and started anyway."

"Ah," she breathed, "good. I didn't say anything terribly crazy, did I? It's dangerous, trying to interpret men while men are around."

I settled my chin on her belly, smiling up her body. She met my eyes between her breasts.

"Considering the bare, inexplicable wanting I have and have had for you," I answered, lowering my voice, "I'd say you were spot on."

Her dimples deepend slowly as she bit her lip.

"Oh, Jon," she said. "You want me? You already have me. You have me, my bull."

"Yes," I replied softly, tightening my arm in the small of her back. "I do. I have love. I have love."

That was the night. Gods, but _that was the night. _I remember. I remember, and I remember remembering. I remember the way that night settled into my soul like a warm ember, quiet, comforting, golden; the way its scenes played themselves out again and again in my head – the carriage ride, the loading dock, the stairs, the hallway, the dinner, the crash; the way I savored the almost physical omnipresence of the memory of Odfrin at my side, Odfrin in my arms, Odfrin against my throat, Odfrin wrapped around me; the way it came back to me at odd moments through the next few weeks, resurging in all its unexpected and unlikely beauty, its suffusing, honey-thick joy, as though the intimacy of those amber hours was too great to truly be escaped, as though they had tangled themselves around my heart and sought to pull me back, back, back into their quiet conjugation.

And now – gods, now _here it is again._ With me. Like the tangling snarls of a knot in time. My heart aches with its internal tugging. My breath grows short. And I know this feeling, and – and – it disturbs me terribly. In all its wonder. My hands tremble with it. My hands never tremble. And I don't understand _why, _for I am still golden with the memory's glory. Why? Why do I shake and gasp with fear, when it is wondrous love? Why?

I do not know. But the evening's true last words rise up in response, and the chill I feel at them is terrible in its foreboding inexplicability. It makes no sense. All I spoke was love.

She lay in the crook of my arm, her head nuzzled on my shoulder, her frizzy curls twined round my throat and behind my head, one leg curled possessively across my abdomen. We lay in soft-breathed silence, staring up from her jumbled bedding at the dark hangings above, both of us lush and languid from love made again and again.

I whispered. "Odfrin?"

Her throat vibrated softly against my chest. "Mmmm?"

"I just wanted to tell you something."

She stretched, rubbing her thigh across my skin.

"What's that?" she asked, pushing up a little way to meet my eye.

I stroked the small of her back slowly, watching her beautiful, sleep-bemused face.

"I realized something," I said after a long pause. "A truth. An important truth."

"What?"

"You have all of me now."

Jon Urfe

in correspondence with

Jon Urfe

2 Sun's Height, 4E XXX


	17. Chapter 16

**AN: LOOK WHO'S BACK. With a 10k word chapter. Chikayeah.**

**Chapter XVI**

Three knocks changed Jon's outlook on Arbasdiil forever. Three quiet, timid, shy raps on his age-split splinter of a door gave Jon all the impetus to optimism he needed to remember the truth of his life in Alinor urban, in all of the comforting warmth to which you have now been privy. Three knocks returned him to himself; returned him from the crusty, bitter, curmudgeonly character he was as he waited in his high-hollowed rooms for the arrival of his breakfast, the morning after his first expedition into Patala and the Solum's deeper subterrane and his subsequent inconsideration toward his goblin servant; returned him from the frowning, black-eyed and black-mooded Jon who sat, slouched in his silken nightshirt, brooding into morning's fire on the twisted trunk-hearth to the smiling, sympathetic, and soft-eyed Jon capable of remembering himself as such, and of writing of all the glowing, comforting memories that came flooding back with his re-realization of his personality. Three knocks re-entangled him in his most treasured night's milk-limbed embrace. Three knocks unlocked his life. Three knocks, on that ancient, blackened wood.

He pulled the door sharply open, frowning darkly out at the soil-stoned corridor.

"Yes?" he snapped shortly, and then spotted his visitor; Falif, his goblin servant, a hunched bundle of white cloth peeking up at him in flashes of brilliant blue from the eye-shadow of his shroud. "Oh, it's you," the human went on. His cheeks creased cross ire with the hard line of his mouth. "You seem to have forgotten something. My breakfast? Where is it?"

"Breakfast izums… later," the goblin began hesitantly.

"Later?" Jon answered flatly. "That's strange. I was under the impression that it already is late."

"Lat_er,_" Falif emphasized. "Now we'z um goin' ta some wheres."

Jon raised a dark eyebrow. "You may inform Tsirelsyn or whoever it was that commanded you to invite me that I will not be attending, whatever it is they have planned. I have no desire to engage in any of the mocking frivolities or parodies of practicality your elves may have dreamt up."

But the goblin shook his bulbous head vigorously. "Nunuvum highnesses, not evenum soilers. I'z um just wanting to show you'z summat, wizud."

"Show me summat?" repeated Jon curiously, caught off guard in the act of closing his door. He peered dubiously down. "What do you mean, Falif?"

"Wizud wantsum to learn, ga?" the goblin said, his head cocking and perking in a glimmering of hopefulness at the man's change in tone. "So I'zum wants to show you summat. Mannoid gon be intrigued?"

"I might," Jon replied slowly. He stared down at the goblin's anxious eyes, frown turned thoughtful. Then he shrugged his broad shoulders, and let the door slip a little wider.

"Very well then," he said. "I will come to see whatever it is. I suppose breakfast can wait."

The goblin's gloved hands clapped together with a startling crack. "A benefit, a benefit, izum definite a benefit," he said happily. "Wizudizum red, then?" He turned as though to limp off down the corridor.

"A moment, a moment," Jon called, holding up a quelling hand. "I must dress first, at least. Hold one moment."

"Hurry um up!" Falif cried, his eyes sparkling brightly. "We'z ums gottago."

"We'll go when I'm ready," Jon muttered, brow creasing. "No sooner."

He retreated back into his high, crevice-gap of a room, frowning and muttering to himself over the goblin's strange proposition as he wrestled with a clean set of purple silk robes, rummaged around in his bedding for his discarded eye patch, and stuffed his feet into his scuffed leather boots.

"Show me summat, he says. What in the world could he want to show me? He had no desire to do so _yester_day. Ahh, this land. Even the servants – slaves – are made strange. If this isn't just some Altmer trick, of course, though it isn't really Tsirelsyn's style. What do I really know about Tsirelsyn's style, though? Nothing. So it's a ridiculous claim to make, Jon. Stay within the bounds of well-founded reasonability. Which means it could be anything, because I really know nothing about this place and its people. Well, and let's to it, then."

He stepped back out into the corridor, straightening his spine and squaring his shoulders, fortifying himself for whatever he might find. The goblin waited, a bobbing bunch of shining cloth.

"Wizud isum red, now?" he said, his eyes on the ground, fallen back into timidity in Jon's absence. "We'z um goinatit?"

"I am ready," Jon affirmed. "Lead on, Falif."

The goblin's head dipped quickly. "Wery good, wizud. Wery good. This one's um path." And, jerking his lopsided shoulders and dragging the toe of a satin-slippered foot along the dark soil-stone, the goblin set off into the amber interstice of tangled halls sheathing the solum's central cavity. Jon followed, still frowning and mulling over the situation.

The two descended quickly through the confluential labyrinth of amorphous soil-shapes and manifolded interconnectivity; much more quickly than Jon had done on his own. The goblin knew exactly where to go; where to double back around a slanted slab to find the narrow glass-glowing gap at its back; where to use a spiral-spire's curves as stair steps up to a bridging span; where to scale the side of a low, wave-walled cliff to the proper stairway above; where to swing hand over hand across a dizzying dark gap. He knew – or seemed to know – every crag and cranny of the soil-stone's wet, musk-mingled interstice; he led with an awkward confidence; a jerking, lopsided lump of white bobbing down through the gloom of the amber glow. And as they descended, climbing and crouching and squeezing between clefts, up ramps, and around the tight curves of smooth spiral stairs, Jon pondered further the curiousness of his servant's behavior. He was not, after all, oblivious to the fact that he had mistreated his goblin the night before; on the contrary, his greatest surprise was that the creature was still willing to speak to him at all, much less lead him off to some unknown spectacle. The goblin had never been particularly talkative to begin with, restraining himself mostly to simple queries to do with his work. Granted that that may have been the result of Jon's own standoffishness, but it seemed somehow _more, _to him, as though there were some barrier of reserve that held the goblin at a distance. _Had _held him at a distance, anyway; it seemed to have been fractured, that morning. Which made no sense.

They had been making their way through the twisted tunnels for perhaps fifteen minutes when Jon mustered the daring to question the goblin directly.

"So, Falif," he began, ducking beneath a fluted wand of glass, "I admit myself confused. I was under the impression that you were not permitted by the soilers to tell me or show me much more of their solum. You aren't breaking their rule, are you?"

The goblin's brilliant blue eyes flashed over his hunched shoulder. "Nutta tall, wizud."

Jon frowned. "Then what was that all about, yesterday? Me not being able to investigate the center of the solum, and everything."

"Um center-space is sensitive," Falif answered without looking back. "Wery weak, wery feebly to um wery baddest of the wery bad's kinwuh. Wizud may'm not go there or b'low, 'cause wizud will um breaks it. But this'n's,' he went on, touching an outcropping of the dark wall gently with one unnaturally long, gloved finger, "this'n's wery stronghardy. Werily webbed; wizu'd may'm not do anyfing to zit tall."

"Mmm," Jon grunted, suppressing a hearty scoff. "I still don't understand why you think us so bad," he said grumpily. "Why you think us so deadly to the soil."

The goblin bobbed his bulbous shoulders repeatedly from side to side in an exaggerated shrug. "Itzum just howum mannoids is," he said. "You'z snaps the wraps wery easy. One singular heel clipper, and WOABAL!" He slammed his huge hands together with a crack. Jon jumped slightly behind him. "Tangular Coe Fishin' sunken by order of Mag'n'Two. We'z iz feeling wery badly for you'z'um, in sincerity, wizud. Mustabe not easy."

Jon made no answer, rendered speechless as he was by the novelty of having been pitied, openly, by a goblin. Falif went on, oblivious.

"Of the course we'z ums is doing the wery same," he said. "Only not such drasticbad. Awaryone inum arena-ring isa doin' it, scepter um soilers. Mannoids just the wery baddest of the wery bad. We'z understandum. You'z cannata be helpin' it, we'z knowing. But still, hafta be careful in the practical veins."

Jon sighed quietly. "Of course," was all he answered. Somewhat mollified by the goblin's professed lack of condemnation and sympathetic tone he was, but still, it galled to be so openly and unashamedly judged for his race by a member of one which was considered by most of the world to be nothing more than savage degenerates. He perked up after a moment, though, in realization. "Wait, wait," he began. "Do you mean that you're only restricted from taking me out to the center of the solum, where the haoma grows, but not anywhere else?" The goblin bobbed its huge head perfunctorily. "And you can answer my questions about other things?" Another bob. "Oh. I had thought you were entirely prohibited from answering my questions and allowing me to explore beyond my chambers and the upper halls."

The goblin halted momentarily, fixing Jon with a flash of the same weighing, disconnected stare as he had worn so often the day before. He spoke quietly, with a degree of sudden hesitancy.

"Areum spottings where wizud maym'n't seek," he said warily, "such um querynums wizud mayn't be acquiesced. But mostuvum is good'n'fine." He stared up at Jon for a second longer, one blue eye bulging between the two halves of his veil. Then he spun heavily about and set off into the tunnels once more.

Jon's slightly surprised silence lasted only a few steps before he leapt on the implied invitation.

"Could you explain something, then?" he said, edging along beside the goblin with his back pressed against a sheer ledge, looking down on a dark pit. "You keep saying that we mannoids are just naturally wery bad for the soil, but I don't understand _how. _You can explain?"

"Kinwuh," the goblin answered simply. "Wery too muchly wit. Pantamountly reekin'."

Jon suppressed a frown. "I don't know this word," he said. "Can you explain?"

Falif peered back at Jon dubiously, feeling his way blindly forward with his spidery hands, floating and eerily white in the dark.

"... you'z um isnota knowing kinwuh?"

"Notta tall."

The goblin's stare bulged out in unease and scrupulous scrutiny. Then he flipped around, giving his white-wrapped head a little shake, and answered.

"Izum... things," he began, strugglingly. "Werily basic things. Ewaryone is a hawing it. Mannoids hawing more, though. Izum... um breaking. Tearing. Sundring. Um... a pushumout? I am sorry. I'z tryin' to explicate, but... wery difficult."

"Don't worryum," Jon said, smiling. "To try is enough. A breaking, sundering, then? So is kinwuh an action?"

"Not um action," the goblin replied. "The back of action, for actuality. The... impeder to action? Notta tall, notta tall, isn't it, wery bad wordly. The _back _of action."

Jon frowned in thought. "The back of action?" he mused. "You mean, the thing that causes the action? The impetus?"

"Ga!" the goblin exclaimed happily, clapping his huge hands together once more in delight. "Ga, ga. _Impetus _to action! Wery well, wizud, wery well."

"So kinwuh is the impetus of a... breaking? Sundering?" Jon asked for clarification. The goblin bobbed his head enthusiastically. "Then why do you think mannoids have more of it? We are not a particularly destructive people."  
Again, the bulging blue stare, this time with a tinge of incredulity. Jon colored slightly in the dark.

"Wery well, we are a bit violent," he said. "but not, I think, much more than any other race of Nirn's peoples. Why should we have, inherently, more kinwuh?"

"Because uwum _air,_" the goblin answered, jabbing one long finger upward, presumably to the surface of the isle far above. "You'z um is breathing ta air, wizud-mannoid. We'z um is breathing in the seas."

"What?" laughed Jon. "Don't be ridiculous! The highnesses breathe the same air as men, however much it might gall them to admit it."

Falif gasped. "Oh noooo, wizud! Oh no no no no no! Wizud isn't knowing! Highnesses is _not _breathing air. Highnesses is breathing water, or fire, but not air. Soilers, wells, and they is a breathin' ta eart."

"That's ridiculous!"Jon exclaimed. "Yes, such things are possible with liberal applications of magicka, but it is ridiculous to say that your highnesses can breathe water _all _the time! And, anyway, I have seen them; they breathe air, just as I do."

Falif shook his head insistently. "No, wizud! They's not!"

"How can you say that? It's obvious that they are!"

"Body-binds isa breathing ta air, ga," the goblin said testily in response, slapping his satins lippers loudly on the soil-stone floor in resentment, "but we'z a nota conversating on ta body-binds! Them _soul-psyches _is breathing water. You'z'm's breathin' ta air. Soilers is breathin' ta eart."

"Soul-psyche?" Jon sputtered angrily. "So it boils down to a fundamental difference between men and elves again, does it?"

"Summuwits ta funny mental," the goblin replied, shrinking back from Jon's ire, his voice gone timid and shy again, "but mostuvum is stembound in um free willings; free willings and um baby-time stories. Wery difficult to morphose, but not funny mental."

"Indeed," Jon sneered, "I would not call men 'funny mental," but rather your highnesses. Regardless, I think you have answered my question to the fullest of your limited abilities. My _thanks, _Falif."

"Wizud is wery welcome, of the course," the goblin replied obliviously. "Wizud is wery welcome in the deed."

Jon just rolled his eyes behind the servant's humped white back, and shook his head at his own cruelty.

The two continued on in silence for a long while, at least half an hour, as the goblin forged on through the tangled interstitial corridors of dark, moist soil-stone and stranded amber glass, on across bridges, through arches, between pillars, up stairs, down spiraling ramps, through web-mazes of glass lattice work like lightning-fused sand, on and on and on until Jon, despite his innate sense for complex pathways and windings of intricacy, had lost all notion of where he was, where his room was, and how to connect the two. He followed in a haze of intrigue, of hypnotized fascination with the profligacy of form and He followed the goblin in blind faith and necessity, until - a final curving corner, a line of accordion wheel-shapes in the walls - and, quite abruptly, everything changed.

Moist, musk-breathing soil-stone transitioned without phase to bright white marble, veined with gold and flecked with rose; the beguiling ball of random form and alienly natural shape shifted starkly to harsh, exact lines and flat planes; the tangle of passages sprawling in every direction possible and impossible resolved suddenly into a single perfectly straight corridor. Three soft steps, like three soft knocks, and the goblin crossed the rigid line dividing diametrically opposed aesthetics.

Jon halted on the soiled side, frowning dubiously forward at the pinprick-pointing corridor ahead. It was several seconds before his goblin guide realized that the guest had been lost.

Falif spun awkwardly around. "Wizud?" he called. "Wizud, you'z ums come along. Summat up the head."

"What is this place, Falif?" Jon asked warily, sniffing the air suspiciously as he leaned over the dividing line between steeped stone and bleached marble.

"Patala, of the course," Falif answered impatiently. "Come um up, come um up!"

"I thought Patala was like... this," Jon said, laying a hand onto the spongy wall beside him. It seemed to sigh in response.

The goblin cocked his huge head. "Is like um there," Falif answered. "Solum is um in Patala, but n ot all wum Patala is wum solum. You'z seize it?"

"But before you told me that the solum was not part of Patala," Jon said, frowning.

The bright blue eyes shifted awkwardly from side to side. "I'z um... maybe missed speaking," he said slowly, hiding his hands behind his back. "I'z not all the ways wery bestest of the wery bestest tonguelings, wizud."

"Oh," Jon said, and smiled softly down at the servant. "That's fine, don't worry about um. So this is the edge of the solum, then?"

"Ga, ga, ga," the goblin answered hastily. He whipped his hands out from behind his back with a whoosh and beckoned vigorously for Jon to follow. "Come um up, wizud, come um up! Summat to be seizing! Summat!"

Jon hesitated at the edge, uncertain he wished to continue and baffled at the feeling. "What is it you want to show me, Falif?" he asked. "Do I really need to see it?"

The goblin threw an exasperated glance over his bulbous shoulders as he shuffled forward down the hall, then snapped back toward Jon in amazement, freezing in midstep. His blue eyes bulged between the folds of his veil, and his head stretched as far out on its spindly little neck as it would go, staring in fixated perplexion at the hesitant human.

"What?" Jon asked after a moment. The goblin made no reply. "Falif? Falif, what is it?"

Still no response; just the incredulous, disconcerted, amazed stare. Then, wery slowly, he turned his body to face the same direction as his head, and stalked up to Jon. He stopped just a few inches away, staring up into the human's single black eye with a gaze like the sky's. His huge head and bulbous eyes filled Jon's vision entirely.

At last he spoke, in a hoarse whisper.

"You are wery odd, wizud," he said. "You are wery odd." Jon could feel the creature's breath on his face, puffing past the satin face mask. And then, without warning, Falif's huge hand flashed up, bopped Jon briskly on the forehead, and seized his wrist to drag him forward onto the white stone.

"Hey!" cried Jon, clapping a palm to his smarting skull. "What was that about!?"

"Wery odd, wizud!" the goblin repeated emphatically. "Mannoids isn't sposed to be um tangleumup wit um solum. You'z is smellin' werily likely to kinwuh, but still you'z is tangledumup! Wery odd, wizud! Wery odd."

"What _are _you talking about?" Jon said angrily, wrenching his wrist from the goblin's grip. "Why did you hit me?"

"Hit you?" Falif repeated, stopping suddenly and looking back, surprised. "Hit you? No, no, no, wizud, newerum hit um up! Contactual discharge, werily only."

"What?" Jon said, taken aback.

"Seize," Falif said, and opened the broad hand that smote Jon's head.

In the center of the bowl-bottomed, satin-covered palm lay a tiny, twisted little amulet, a flat, simple little knot of dried, blue-stained hide. A dirty loop of white string attached to one end dangled from the edge of the goblin's hand.

"Seize?" said Falif happily, as though that explained everything, "simply contactual dischargement."

"I am not um seizing," Jon answered slowly, frowning down at the amulet as the goblin moved to replace it around his neck. "What is this object?"

Falif froze once more. His eyes bulged, if possible, even larger than they had before. Jon braced himself.

"You'z um not knowing," the goblin breathed in horror. "You'z um not knowing! You'z um not knowing!" he squeaked. "Ohhhhh, wizud! Oh, turbly turble turble! Werily despraying! _Werily _despraying!"

"What?" responded the human with a perplexed little laugh. "What are you on about, little fellow?"

"Ohhhh, wizud," the goblin crooned, hiding his eyes behind a hand, "you'z um not _knowing. _Come um up, wizud. You must come um up. Ohhh, werily worse than I'z thoot. We'z _must_ get um up to the summat."

"What?" laughed Jon for the third time, completely confused but touched by his servant's sincerity of feeling. "Falif, what are you talking about? Where um are we going?" The goblin just tugged more forcefully on the man's thick wrist, muttering mournfully to himself.

"Oh, wery wery bad, wizud," he murmured, pulling Jon along, "turbly turble bad. Ohhh, wizud..."

He kept on that way no matter how much Jon questioned him. Eventually the human stopped, and resigned himself to a long wrist-wrangled drag down the subterranean corridor in the grip of an incessantly mumblng near-cripple of a goblin whose soundness of mind he was beginning to seriously doubt. What had he meant by 'tangledumup,' anyway, or 'contactual discharge'? Why had he felt so impelled to strike Jon's forehead? And why, above all else, did he find Jon's ignorance of the nature of his tiny knotted amulet so 'turbly' disturbing? The human found no answers; only incomprehensible mutterings and frantic insistence toward progress; only the unending sameness of stark-edged marble corridor and its stiff strips of ochre glow-glass, on and on into Patala without cease or variation until forwards looked exactly the same as backwards; nothing more than a narrowing pinprick point of perspective. And still they walked. They walked for what seemed like hours, and for all the difference Jon could tell from one spot to the next, might as well have not dislocated at all - save that finally, _finally, _a change did come.

An archway loomed up on them from the amber-stripped vanishing point. A high, gilded arch, but unadorned save for simple embossings of a twining knot motif. The goblin drew up short, before Jon could ask anything of what lay with or beyond.

"Ooh, wizud," Falif moaned quietly, cupping Jon's hands in his own, parent to child in size, and rubbing gentle comfort in with his thumbs. "Wizud, I'z um so werily sorry for you'z. I'z woozn knowing! I'z woozn knowing. But itum be okey, wizud. _Here _is summat. _Here _is summat what helpsum. Here is _two _summats, in the actuality, for _two _helpsum, but you'z better to start withum one in the lone, wizud. One in the lone, for um firsties."

"What is this place, Falif?" Jon asked bewilderedly, staring about the stiff marble hall and craning his neck to see ahead to the interior of the arch. "Why have you brought'n me here?"

"To _learn _um up," the goblin answered earnestly, "to learn um up like wizud spake isa wanting, but - ooh, wizud, I'z woozn knowing so turbly you'z necessitatesum."

Jon made to speak again, to demand the goblin explain himself more fully, but Falif cut him off with a vigorous shake of his bulbous head and an abrupt about face toward the arch.

"Come um up, wizud," he said, voice crackingly distraught. "Come um up, and um beginnin' ta learn um up." He pulled Jon forward, under the golden arch.

At first Jon thought it was just another corridor, joining the first at a right angle, so similar was the arches' interior to its exterior, with the same smooth, polished marble walls and sharp-angled ceiling, the same slice-strips of glass and dim-stretching horizon line. Then he realized that it did not, in fact, continue on into pinpricked eternity in the same way as the first, but ended quite quickly in a massive pair of ebony doors, plated in triangles of ivory and bars of amber to mimic the effect of the corridor's perspective.

"This is what you want to show me, Falif?" Jon asked, sweeping his eye across the huge doors. "What lies beyond? Why so far out here? How -" But he was cut off once more, for in his fixation upon the doors ahead, Jon had completely forgotten the goblin's actual physical presence - as well as that presence's grip on the human's hairy wrist. He was jerked abruptly to the left; caught in midstep and set stumbling and fumbling and trying to catch his balance as the goblin dragged him obliviously forward down a narrow side hall letting on to the archway.

"Falif!" Jon exclaimed in exasperation. "Can't you warn me before you do that?"

The goblin rolled a look back at him. "If'n its helping," was the grudging answer.

"It would be helping, yes," Jon replied sourly, "at least with keeping me on my feet. Whatsup um with the sudden change, anyway? I thought we were going to see um behind the big doors."

"That's um second summat," the goblin said, shaking his head. "Wait um up, wizud. You'z bein' seize it slater. _Here _zum first summat." He pointed one long gloved hand forward, to the end of the narrow side hall, where a stone door glowed amber with sun glass set in the shape of an aspen tree. Jon's brows rose in surprise; he knew that design. "_This _ums zit," Falif went on happily as they came closer. "Summat!"

They drew up before the door. Jon had just an instant to admire the design's intricacy and to marvel at the presence of that familiar complexity, its thousand intertwined twigs and tiny, heart-shaped leaves pulsing with easy ochre blur, before Falif's hand dove once more into the depths of his uniform and flashed forward to press his knotted amulet on its dirty string against the stone, and the slim-trunked tree split with a dusty groan, grinding away into the walls to either side. Gloom was its wake.

"This ums it," said Falif with pleasure, stumping forward and disappearing into the musty murk beyond. "Here's um summat. Ayoo, wizud, come um - arrgghahaghhhhaghh!"

"Falif?" Jon called in alarm. "Falif, are you all right?" He strained his eye, but could see nothing beyond the darkness draped entryway. "Falif?"

A quiet scuffling drifted to Jon's ears, then a mumbled string of indistinguishable angry words.

"Mall right!" the goblin's voice barked suddenly. "Dam um up patootin ragamuffed goodyboffins... canna seize um at _all. _Come um up, wizud, come um up. Mebbe lighters be lightening for you'z. Dam um, all wum. Wuz um height stickaly, eh? Forgotten old sod meister."

"Come um up, you said?" Jon repeated nervously. "Is it - safe?"

"Safer num seas," the goblin answered grumpily. "Come um up, wizud, come um up."

Jon hesitated. He could still see nothing beyond the doorway save blackness, and the smell seeping out from it was all must and dust and decay; the smell of neglect, and not something he had yet found in Alinor. It set his bones strangely atingle; his empty eye socket prickled under its silk mask. He felt as though he stood before a disgorged tomb of time. It was ridiculous, of course, just as his reluctance to cross the solum's bounds had been ridiculous, but there all the same. He had no desire to be struck again, however, so he sucked in a deep breath of the dry, stale air, and stepped firmly forward into the dark.

"Good wizud," came the goblin's voice from somewhere to his left as he halted at the fuzz-filtered edge of the dim carpet of amber light rolled out into the dark from the doorway. "Now we's um be awaited. Lightnings shoulda be come; wizud is werily halfway tall. Wait um."

"Awaited?" Jon repeated as he turned his head this way and that, trying to make out something, anything in the darkness. For all his eye's momentary dilation soreness, though, he could still see nothing. "What um you mean by that?"

"Pay the tense," Falif answered cryptically. A big hand patted Jon's arm fumblingly. "It's um _wery _old, wizud. Wery old, and not a bottum um been to do the scrubadub and oilies. Pay the tense."

Jon shook his head wryly, smiling openly to himself in the gloom's safety but suppressing his chuckle. It always was an interesting experience, learning a new language, but perhaps more so when the language to be learned was but a garbled version of one's own. He kept silent and still once his amusement had died down, and waited patiently in the dark. They both did; the goblin humming off key beneath his breath and patting Jon's arm encouragingly at odd intervals. They waited, and waited, and waited, but nothing happened; no 'lightnings' came; no machinery set to work; no enchantments activated. Eventually the goblin gave a huff of confusion and stamped his satin-slippered foot against the ground.

"Well and what," he grumped. "_Summat. _You'z nota workin um out wery well. What's um problem? Eh? Eh? Hmm." He fell silent. The sound of his long foot's furious tapping was like the pattering of mice.

"Would you like me to cast a spell?" Jon offered awkwardly. "I've felt that your highnesses mostly don't appreciate magic from us humans, but maybe they wouldn't feel it all the way out here. Especially just a simple little light."

"Mmm?" grunted the goblin. "Magickin? No day, no day, wizud; maintain um up in you'z long-pants. Magickin is not um problem. Problem ism _notici _- aha!" His cry cracked out, high and sharp. "I have you answer! You'z, wizud!" A huge fist punched Jon's arm playfully - and bruisingly. "_You'z _is not um evenly _halfway _tall nuff! Jump um up! Waver um arms!"

"Excuse me?" replied Jon bemusedly, rubbing his bicep. The goblin was strong, for such a little thing; his arm felt as though that punch had left a bruise, which was somewhat remarkably considering that Jon was not exactly unmuscled and how offhandedly it had been thrown. "What in um world are you'z talkin' about?"

"Um _arms, _wizud," repeated the goblin, grabbing Jon's elbow and trying to push it up into the air. "You'z not _evenly _halfway tall. Waver um arms!"

"You are the strangest little creature," Jon mumbled under his breath, "but very um arms!"

He thrust his fists above his head and gave a vigorous swirl through the dark. Nothing happened. Another swirl. Still nothing. A third, and a spontaneous little leap to boot. And with a sudden sparking little crackle, light like the tears of stars flickering slowly into life above them.

"Ahh, there um grows," Falif sighed happily, clapping his hands together loudly. "Wery well preformed, wizud. Wery well."

"Thank you, Falif," Jon replied, shaking his head. "It was so very difficult." The goblin just nodded dumbly, blinking oblivious sympathy, and Jon had to hold back a fond chuckle; this servant clearly had not been exposed to sarcasm. He grinned with one side of his mouth as he looked around the fitfully illuminating chamber.

The pale, fluttering blueish light, sparking and spiking and glittering by turns in the wombs of slim crystals set into a ring of high alcoves in the curving marble walls, revealed a landscape of lunar abandonment; every inch of the small round room's floors, its scattered tables, desks, and shelves and tumbled jumbles of chairs and stools and stepladders, its array of metallic pedestals and clutter of overturned paraphernalia, its spiraling stairs and elevated central platform, was all of it blanketed in a thick layer of moon-frothy dust. It shone intermittent gray-white in the shuddering illumination.

"W- what is this place?" Jon asked, more in shock than in actual curiousity (for he knew too well, too much of what it was, in the seat of his soul) as he stepped forward to investigate, picking among the long-lain litter. "What summat um me to see?"

"Placenta um learn um up," Falif answered, watching Jon's careful examination closely and wringing the lapel of his uniform with nervous hands. "Sumum oncely was hereum to learn um up. Ta placenta remembers um. I'z thinking..." he trailed off, shrugging awkwardly. "I'z thinking you'z um coulda be edumaking here, wizud. Werily goodly placenta for zit."

"What makes you say that?" Jon asked absently, frowning as he bent to swipe a hand through the dust covering the back of a carven ivory and moonstone chair. It stuck to his hand, soft like the fuzziness of morning-mouth.

"Is way'z owum," the goblin answered with a shrug, looking off put by the question. "Disum woozn ever um useled for anyuwum buta learnumup. And um placenta is membrin. I'z thinking, I was, that such enough for you'z to be doina same wery well."

"Hmmm." In the shining, iridescent path his hand had swept clean on the back of the chair there shone, with moonstone oilslick shimmer, the same aspen sapling emblem as that borne upon the door. Jon knew that emblem. He had seen it every day for much of his life. He frowned down at it, wondering at its presence, but then moved on without making mention to the goblin, wiping his fluff-fuzzed hand on his robes as he stepped deeper into the chamber's ancient clutter. "How was it being used for learning?" he asked. "Who used it, and when?"

The goblin shrugged again, blue eyes wide and surprised; it seemed he had not expected Jon to continue to ask questions once they had reached his 'summat,' but rather that the human should just immediately have assimilated all Alinorian knowledge by virtue of the location's historical association with 'learnumup.' He didn't quite know how to react to the situation's disappointing reality.

"Leviathan-long time ago, wizud," he answered hesitantly. "_Leviathan-_long. _Bring the fore _of the leviathan, really. We'z um only is knowing the bouts of it because wum St- err, ta other summat. Was um stud-ring spot for um young-strung soiler, leviathan-long ago."

"The study of an apprentice edaphomancer?" the human mused thoughtfully under his breath after a moment of interpretation. "And aeons ago, though I already knew that, if... hmmm. I must investigate further. Excuse me, Falif, but it's better that I not be interrupted, if you'z nota minding."

"Werily not, wizud!" the goblin answered enthusiastically, looking relieved. "Werily not! Learnumup! I'z um be awaited out of the side." He stumped happily off through the arched doorway and slumped to the ground with a muffled thump against the wall in the dim amber hall.

Distraction removed, Jon set to work; set to prying and poking, stooping and peering, shuffling and sorting through and through the undergrowthed tangle of abandoned furniture, literature, and equipment in that high-vaulted chamber deep in Patala's depths. He lifted tables and straightened chairs, scrutinized shelves and stared into deep stone cabinets, rattled drawers and shook warped cedarwood boxes, his face a picture of intent focus, taut and hardy and washed out in the stark, flickering light.

What he found was the corpse of a laboratory. The tables and desks lining the walls were littered with ancient, bubbled glassware and obscure metal fixtures, desiccated wire-weave tubing and crumbling redware, jagged rusted tools and piles on piles on piles of leather-bound books and rough, stiff-clipped journals, fragile and faded to decrepit illegibility, and crystals, crystals, crystals; translucent, reflective, milky; smoothed, cut, rough in their womb-stone; black, white, iridescent, slate-grey; moon-dust miniature, fat in the hand, ponderous as pregnancy; in every shape, every size, every color imaginable: crystals. And with them, cloth; tattered and torn and frayed; whole and smooth and shining when shaken free of dust; choking chains trailing the shed-threads of an unfinished weave or neatly hemmed and whole; thin and thick, full and frail, fine and coarse: cloth. Everywhere cloth; everywhere crystal; everywhere folded and tumbled and tangled together throughout the mess of the laboratory's abandonment. And so when Jon finally scuffed a slow path through the time-frill of the central platform's broad, spiraling stairs, his lungs imbued with the must of risen dust, robes streaked grey from the brush of the past, heart slowed to the beat of eternity, he was not surprised to find these two things together once more. Not surprised, and yet still affected.

He stepped slowly up to the huge, half-circle marble desk that was the platform's devotion. The crystal lanterns sparked and flared in the walls around him, popping with the prickling of his skin. A massive, high-backed moon-stone armchair stood pushed away and ajar from the desk's dusty edge. Crystal and cloth awaited him in its grasp. Crystal: a jagged gem the color of rosy dawn, long as his forearm and hexagonally faceted, set in a stylized black metal matrix, nested in the brown remnants of long-rotted cushions. Cloth: byssus, in all its natural richness, its deep honey-gold, smooth and shining as hairless elven skin, draped across the back of the chair to pool and puddle around the rosy crystal. The entire chamber was dust and stark-stripping light, all black and white and grey bare-bones, the flesh of hue ripped away, but these two items yet gleamed with their own soft, internal luster.

Jon's hands reached without command; hard edges under cold metal webbing met his fingers. The crystal, and zinging tingles up Jon's arm. He hefted it, and stared deep into its depths. There were words there, etched upon it in flowing Aldmeri script; upon, and _within, _in a hundred - a thousand - a million interlocked layers. He stared in numb fascination, turning the jewel before his eye. But not for long, for it was not the crystal that truly drew him; not the crystal that made his hand tremble as he reached for it; not the crystal whose silky stroke sang through his mind; not the crystal he pressed to his mouth, to his nose, to his skin in mindless rushing sensuality and paralyzed inevitability, feeling and seeing and smelling and drawing the sensations into himself like a sensation-starved leper...

And not the crystal that he thrust away from his body with a sudden shudder, recoiling in shocked realization of the senseless sensual strangeness of his behavior. The cloth fluttered softly down to the chair's ivory seat, a flutter-by's premature death, the sigh of a disappointed lover. He stared at it a long moment, his single black eye bulging and blinking back tingling tears. Something in him still wanted it, wanted to wrap itself in that long span of cloth like a coccoon and never emerge again. He shuddered once more, and broke his gaze to blank fixation down instead at the rosy crystal in his hand. Too much. He had been alone too long. Things like that did not happen to him. That was for flighty airy, insubstantial people, not him. He kept himself firmly grounded. Too long away from humanity must have disturbed his balance. The alternatives, after all, were not even close to comfortable conception. He shuddered one last time, and put the length of cloth out of his mind, focusing in truth upon the crystal in his hand. And realized, with a start, what he had found.

"Mother of gods!" he exclaimed, staring down at the line-etched layers of the rosy stone. "A memory matrix? How in all the worlds did I miss that?" His eye flickered momentarily back to the draped sea-silk's snare in answer, but pulled quickly back to the crystal. He stared a moment more, marveling at his own incredible obliviousness and at the luck of finding such a thing _there, _in Alinor of all places. Then his hand dove suddenly into the folds of his rumpled, dust-streaked black robes, and came flashing back out again, fingers suckled around a shard of metal and matrix, and Jon's Mangler pulled a snarling path through the light.

A splinter of golden crystal as long as the man's palm, narrowed to needle thinness at one end and set in a jagged base of meteoric iron at the other. Etched in tiny, flowing elven script across and below and within each of its eight facets, it was disturbingly similar to the larger, more sanguine gem in Jon's other hand. But their functions were entirely different.

Fingers pressed; sixteen long, many-jointed iron mandibles sprang out from the Mangler's metal setting. Jon's hand slid confidently along the shard, smoothing the thing's spider legs backwards, up and around the base of the larger crystal. He pressed carefully, metal into metal, and with a sharp click, the Mangler's mandibles snapped into place in the metal setting of the memory matrix. Jon smiled, satisfied in his own expertise, and then set the crystal complex in the dust of the maze-marbled desk, standing upright on its end, the Mangler's narrow needle shining in the flickering light. His hands busied themselves behind his head, and the spangled silk patch slipped free; his empty eyelid fluttered hollowly. He bent eagerly forward over the crystal, his fingers pulling, prying at empty flesh, and the hole in Jon's head slid snugly down around his Mangler.

And he stood there, hunched in the fitful flickering star glow, bent in the depths of the earth, bowed over dust and decay, speared, lanced, skewered on his own will, as his Mangler sparked, its metal matrix flashed, the etched layer-letters of both crystals flared golden and rosy from within, and his semblance of an eye blinked with the approximation of vision, with the reappropriation of consciousness, the reawakening of long slumbered song, with word-bones long unbound binding. The treasures of the memory matrix broke on his brain in waves of distorted, disattuned understanding - and as the first inklings of comprehension dawned in Jon's mind, _jolted _viciously through him, straightening his spine in a shivering electric lash. The Mangler sucked free from his head with a squelch, and the crystals clattered across the dusty desk.

He stared down at the linked matrices. His skin still shivered with the shock of the disconnection. He had never experienced anything approaching such an abrupt disinterface, or the vibration of catalyst that had precipitated it. It was not something that should _be able _to happen; it was entirely outside of his explanation. His fingers twitched carefully toward the crystals; touched, and no response, no shock. He stripped the spidery legs of the Mangler's mandibles away from the rosy, innocent-looking memory matrix - could it be booby-trapped? - and pressed them back into their metal ring with a click, stowing the golden needle-stone back within his robes. "That... was very odd." Jon shook his head, and chuckled at his own understatement. Falif's 'summat' chamber seemed determined to shake his presumptions about himself and his craft with extraordinary occurrences; the cloth, and now this. The effect of the shock was dissipating quickly, though; he shook his head again, and then laughed a little. "Oh well. I'd have thought that _this _pair would be one I wouldn't have to jerry-rig, but no matter: there's always the tinkerer's approach." He smiled, and tossed the rosy gem happily in the air, catching it nimbly as it flashed in the flickering light. "And worth it, too, because who knows what _you _hold. We'll see, though. Regardless of your tricks and traps, we'll see." Another chuckle, and then Jon stumbled pleasedly on down the platform's broad, spiraling stairs, scuffing a wake of eddying silver wind through the chamber's moon-dust fuzz and on, back into the warm amber glow of the hall. And despite the strangeness of the moment so nearly passed and the absurdity of his casual dismissal of that strangeness - an absurdity he should have seen himself - Jon hesitated only a fraction of a step in the doorway, looking up momentarily from his delighted perusal of the stone. And it was not a thought of the memory matrix's bizarre access that stopped him. The skin-warm golden sea-silk slid a little lower into its majestic seat, glimmering down at him in the stark light. Waiting. He shuddered, and jerked himself back around. The room's ring of star-shining crystals popped and sputtered and guttered back into darkness with his absence... but the cloth gleamed still in the dark.

"Well, Falif, you certainly did well," said Jon cheerily as he sank down next to the startled goblin sitting against the wall. He shook the rosy crystal under Falif's eyes with a wink. "This here is most _definitely _worth missing breakfast and getting bopped on the head."

"What is um, eh?" the goblin asked, blue eyes wide and staring. "What's um wizud found?"

Jon shrugged. "I'm not actually sure what to call it," he said. "It's akin to what I would normally name a spectra-sphere, but clearly that's not applicable here. There's nothing round about this."

"Spectrums sphere?" the goblin repeated slowly, awed.

The human caught the baffled look, and blushed at his own inconsideration. "Ah, I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't use words like that. I can get a bit - obtuse, sometimes. Even some of my own wizud friends don't understand me. This crystal is a kind of - well, very crudely, a storage device for memory. That's not _really _accurate, of course - it stores, um, um, ranges of understanding, really; the _back _of memory - but it's enough for you to get why I'm excited about it."

"Waitumup, waitumup." The goblin waved his huge gloved hands. "Stones um got um membrin?"

Jon smiled. "Sort of," he answered. "It's - well, it's not really memory so much as it is the range of patterns that give rise to memory. The _back _of memory. To encode actual memory wouldn't really work to allow anyone except the original viewer access. No one thinks exactly the same as anyone else, you'z knowing um? If you'z wants to allow other people to understand your thoughts, you have to embrace imperfect translation, and encode in a range of interpretations, not in actual thought. Like words; words are a form of spectral transmission, because they don't have just one meaning. Everyone has their own language, you know? No one's definitions for a language's words are quite the same as anyone else's. They can't be. To communicate, we have to approximate, we have to come close. And that's what this does," he said, lifting the rosy gem. "It takes one's thoughts and lets them partially disintegrate, then records a normal distribution of the variable fidelity alterations; it generates a spectra. Then anyone who knows how to link themselves to the device can come along and generate - not the same, but a similar pattern as that intended by the original encoder. It's no different than any other form of communication, really, except in its longevity and ease of adjustment." He paused in his rush, catching his breath, and looked up from the crystal clutched in his hands to find the goblin watching him in stern disamusement from under his white veil. Jon's cheeks heated once more.

"I got a little technical there in spite of myself, didn't I?" He laughed nervously. "Sorry."

Falif just blinked and shook his bulbous head, like a dog with a gnat in its ear. After a moment, he spoke.

"This ums having the wordly-wise," he said, laying the tip of one long finger on the crystal. "Ga?"

"Ga," Jon answered, nodding. "It has um wordly-wise."

"And um you'z a be readumup, ga?" the goblin went on, as though speaking to an idiot.

"Sortuvum," Jon answered, tilting his head and scrunching up his face with the innacuracy of the explanation. "I will be reading it, but the wordly I read won't be the wordly that was wrote."

Falif's heavy greenish brow lowered in a frown. "You'za be readumup," he repeated, pointing to the letters etched in the gem, "and learnumup soil-snarings. Ga?"

Jon sighed, shaking his head with a wry smile. "Ga," he said. "In essence, I will be readumup and learnumup. Speaking of which," he went on, tucking the crystal into the crook of his arm, "are you sure this summat was the stud ring of a soiler's apprentice?"

The goblin bobbed his head vigorously. "Oh ga, ga, wery sure. Placenta um soiler student, werily leviathan-long times ago."

"It's just odd," Jon said, "because I didn't find a single piece of soil in there, just crystals and - cloth. Wouldn't um edaphomancers' apprentice have um soil?"

"Well, quite in the deed," the goblin answered. "Quite in the deed. Butum there is um no soiler-student a here _now, _wizud. We'z um no letting aggregates escape... as um you'z knowing."

"If by 'aggregates' you mean soil, then yes, I do know," the human replied dryly. Falif huffed a laugh behind his veil, and Jon allowed himself a tiny smile. "So the soil was taken away, then, after the apprentice's leaveumup?" he asked.

"Ga, ga," Falif said. "Werily my'z um incestors was remowing um and back to um solum. Of the course, wizud, of the course."

"Mm. Well, all right then. It makes sense. I just don't understand the other things. Why so much cloth?"

The goblin's only answer was a long draught of his bulge-eyed stare. Jon frowned down at the crystal in his arms, musing on what he had found and how he had found it, and avoiding, like the hare dodging round a waiting fox, what had found _him _in its finding. But even without that unsettling phenomenon, there was plenty to ponder; the strangeness of the chamber's contents, of the misplaced jumbling of cloth and crystal in the laboratory of an edaphomancer's apprentice - was there some unexpected facet to the edaphomancers' craft that required knowledge of matrices and textiles, or had this apprentice simply been abnormal? - the isolation of its location, deep in Patala's straight-edged marble halls, far removed from the solum's soil-stone - why house an apprentice so far from the object of his study? - the bizarreness of the goblin's behavior, both in the very idea of bringing his human ward out to the site of some 'leviathan long-gone' soil student at all, and in the particulars of its enaction - why had Falif struck him so abruptly, and why had he been so upset when Jon did not immediately recognize his little amulet? But perhaps most intriguing of all to the human wizard sitting there, deep within Nirn's belly, a goblin at his side in the amber glow, wondering and puzzling and pondering over the many mysteries that morning's three knocks had revealed, stemmed from the place's poignant familiarity. For Jon knew the 'summat' to which Falif had brought him. The amber aspen on the door, the flickering crystals, the metal pedestals, the cut of the marble construction - he knew them. They rose like old friends from moldering graves; they spoke to him of warmer times, of the love and learning and connection he had had in his own learning youth back in Cyrodiil. And this was no surprise; for the place was constructed on the pattern of the very same Ayleidoon architecture that housed the Miscarcand Cynosure of the College of Whispers, the only place he cared to call home. The chamber to which the goblin had brought him seemed redolent of his own studious past because it looked like his very own study back in Cyrodiil, where the star-blinking welkynd stones ringed his dynamistograph round on its central pedestal, where the walls were lined in cluttered desks and shelves strewn with the detritus of his departure, and the lodestone-locked door glowed brilliant blue with the _exact same design _as that in amber upon this chamber's sealed door. The details were different in everything else, but the archetype was identical. And so it was no mystery that Jon should feel an identification with the place; it was simple association. There was no mystery to it. None whatsoever. There was nothing more to it than plain physical similarity. Nothing at all.

No, the familiarity itself was easily explained – but the source of that familiarity, the foundation, the recurrence of pattern, was another matter entirely. The Miscarcand Cynosure was elven in construction, of course – a ruin of the Heartland High Elf civilization, the Ayleids – but that was no reason to think that it should be similar to anything in Alinor; the Altmer were quite distinct from their mainland cousins, even in long-gone millenia. Jon certainly had not been struck by any similarity up to that point; all of Alinor's architecture had seemed as bizarre to him as though it had been the first of elven make he had ever encountered. So why should that chamber be so redolent of Cyrodiil's Ayleid ruins? Why should it be lit in star-twinkling blue-white instead of the usual penumbral amber of Patala? Why should it be marked with an emblem identical to that found so commonly in Ayleid work? Had there been an actual _Ayleid _living in Alinor? Not so surprising, perhaps – but infinitely more so that that Ayleid should have been an edaphomancer's apprentice. Jon did not think that they had been the sort of elves to produce even as few quasi-practical agriculturalists, or attempts at such, as the Altmer produced. There was the spectral crystal to consider as well, he realized, glancing down at the rosy gem in his arms. The design was clearly Ayleidoon; he was quite well informed on the matter, having conducted a thorough investigation into ancient Heartland comprehension techniques in his magisterial studies, as part of an attempt to more fully understand the working of his most important tool, the Ayleidoon artifact that he called his Mangler. And yet that tool seemed incapable of easy synchronization with the new-found memory matrix.

But still, if it was true that an Ayleid had at one time been in Alinor as an edaphomancer's apprentice, and with enough influence to warrant the construction of a study more familiar to his or her aesthetics, then the question became both simpler and more complex: why? Why would an Ayleid be in Alinor, studying soil-sorcery, of all things? They were a race of twisted, perverted artists, not devoted agriculturalists. Why too would the edaphomancers accept such an apprentice? Altmer arrogance did not extend _quite _so far when it came to comparisons to other races of mer – omitting the dark elves, naturally – as it did with comparisons to the races of men, but it was a near thing. Jon did not think that such an exclusive cult as that of the soil-sorcerers, backward and wrongheaded as they were, would grant membership to one of the star-stricken Heartland elves. It did not seem likely in the slightest that such could have happened, at least to Jon – and yet the crystal in his arms, the design on the door, the architecture beyond were all near indubitable proof that it had. It happened; an Ayleid studied soil-sorcery in that chamber, in that echo of Jon's own office. An Ayleid collected cloth and crystal behind that amber aspen. And, judging from the chamber's frantic, disarrayed abandonment, an Ayleid fled down that narrow little hall some fateful day in the Merethic. And _why? _Why flee? What had happened? What could make him leave, once he had come? Why would he leave? _Why? _

The questions burned in Jon's mind as he sat there, frowning fiercely down at the crystal in his arms, so intent and focused on his private little puzzle that he nearly squeaked when a huge white hand patted his knee nervously. He managed to hold in the squeak, but could not prevent himself from jerking in surprise.

"Apologeticals," the goblin murmured shyly, pulling back. "Apologeticals, wizud."

"Oh, no, don't apologet," Jon replied, waving a hand. "You just surprised me, is all. What do you need?"

"Needum nothing!" Falif answered earnestly, shaking his head. "I'z um just thinking that you'z was a looking werily... angerdup. You'z um was feeling the Oh and Kay?"

Jon blushed and smiled down at his hands. "Oh, I'm fine. I was just thinking about some things."

"Readumup crystal?"

"Ga, some of what," Jon answered with a half-assenting nod.

"You'z um will be able to a usen it, ga?" the goblin asked, tapping the crystal.

"I think so," said Jon. "I found an established interface like I expected, but for some reason I got weird results when I attempted a connection. Probably just a warp or short in the metal after so long that's blaggered up the interface, so I'll probably have to establish a new site. It's no problem; I jig and wiggle my way into spectral records all the time; most of them don't have pre-existing connection protocols. I'll get it working. Don't worry um."

"Good, good," Falif replied happily. "Wizud will be werily learnedumup!"

"Well, I hope so," Jon laughed. "There's no real telling what the owner recorded herein, so I guess we'll see."

The goblin just bobbed his head happily, clearly confident that Jon had only to crack the crystal like the spine of a book to gain access to all its assets. It would not be that easy, Jon knew, and so his smile was wry as he fell back into silence, considering how, in fact, he would go about extracting the object's information. But his brown study had barely begun before he cut it off, realizing as the goblin at his side began to hum and tap the bottom of his satin slippers idly that he was being a little rude. He watched his servant for a moment more before speaking.

"You know, Falif," he began, "I really need to say something."

The goblin blinked at him bemusedly. "Whatum wizud needsa say?"

"Two things," Jon answered. "'Thank you,' and 'I'm sorry.'"

"You brought me out here on your own initiative," he went on, looking down at the white marble floor instead of meeting the goblin's wide blue eyes. "I didn't ask. You just did it, on your own. And because you did, I have something here that could help me learn so much more about this place, something I could never have found on my own. So – thank you."

"As for the other – well. I must admit that I have not treated you with as much kindness as I should," he said with a harsh frown of self-directed sternness. "Last night, and this morning, I was both rude and cruel. I apologize. I am sorry for it."

He stared blankly down at the gem in his arms in the silence that followed his words, stubbly cheeks red and hot with shame and the awkwardness of apology. Apology to a goblin, no less, which Jon could surely never have predicted would be a part of his experience in Alinor. He hadn't even been sure that the race was truly sentient, before arriving; they were considered beasts, in Cyrodiil. The edge of his surprise had been blunted by the circumstances of the revelation – having been in the middle of a strip-search at the time – and by his overpowering angst at his placement in Arbasdiil, but it came home to him there in that tiny offshoot pocket of Patala; his servant was a _goblin, _quite clearly sentient, and at least moderately intelligent; he had found the spectral comprehension crystal in his arms because of a _goblin's _three timid knocks; he had just apologized to a _goblin_. A goblin sat at his side.

He looked up, and met the eyes he had been avoiding; wide, blue, bulbous. A goblin's eyes. Falif had Jon fixed with his disconcertingly exaggerated wondering, incredulous stare; unsettled and unsettling both.

"Wizud," he whispered, "you are so wery, wery odd."

Jon coughed a laugh. "Am I?" he said. "Well, perhaps. What makes you'z say um so, though?"

The thick satin-sleeved shoulders inclined up toward the goblin's hidden ears. "Because you'z um _wizud," _he sighed disbelievingly, "but you'z um is knowing not the thing. You'z um _wizud, _but you'z um apologeticals to _me._"

Jon smiled softly. "I'd like to think that anyone would um do the same as I, if they had had the same experiences," he said. "In which case it's not wery odd at all. As far as knowledge goes, though – well, you'z ums gotta me this, right?" He hefted the crystal. "I'll know plenty soon, with any of um lucks."

The goblin shook his huge head, still disbelieving. "Werily odd, wizud. Werily odd." He fell silent, staring down at the marble floor instead of at the human. Jon waited shyly for him to go on, tracing with an idle fingertip the swirling metal web encasing his comprehension crystal. The moment stretched on, though, without a sound from the goblin save his quiet wheezing breathing, and a question occurred to Jon; the single question out of all his pondering to which he might reasonably expect an answer.

"So, Falif," he began, "I have a bit of a wondering."

"A wondering?"

Jon nodded. "Yes, um wondering. Because, see, I just don't understand why you would choose to do this for me. Why come seek um me out, this morning? Why, after I was so rude to you, would you give me such a gift? What prompted um?"

For the first time Jon had seen, those huge blue eyes showed an activity in expression of emotion other than shock and disconcertation; instead of bulging blue beams, they crinkled into soft crescents.

"Why'z um I'm doin' to bring you'z ta um learnumup summat?" he said. "Why'z um not? You'z um was a explication me summat I'z a never knowing. You'z um showed me that um wizuds isna suchly diff in rent from we'z. You'z um was telling me that um wizuds nota knowing all the things, justa like we'z. 'We are not so diff in rent as you are thinking," you'z said. And I'z um guessling we'z not. We both needa learn um up, to the gather."

"So I'z showing you to um summat," he went on in Jon's stunned silence, "so you'z can learnumup, be the cause I'z knowing wery well a how it is feeling to know werily little contra pearly to otherlings. You'z learnumup werily well whatta I'z am um knowing, and then um may the be to learnumup to the gather to um what the ever neither wus is knowing. To the gather. Sawwy?"

The word hung in the air between them for a long moment. Jon could only stare, amazed at the acceptance and understanding of the being he had thought of as nothing more than an idiotic slave; as a creature, not a person.

"Sawwy, wizud?" Falif repeated, a tinge of worry in his voice. "Sawwy?"

"Sawwy," Jon managed. "Sawwy, Falif. We will learnumup to the gather."

"Wery good, wizud," the goblin replied, eyes crinkling again between their bright white veils. "We'z um will justa fun bull along to the gather, and may the be to get um to a werily high wiserly statehood, in the event jewel. Now, though, I'za thinking we'z shoulda be mill treading back. Wizud must be turbly hungered."

"Ahh, well," laughed Jon as he pushed himself to his feet at the goblin's cue, "yes, yes, I am, rather."

"Of the course, of the course," the goblin replied with a high little giggle. "Wizuds isn't livinitup on ta earth-airs alonely, now is um? Need um some um sust ants! Wery well, wery well, I'z um be seizing to that in the short. So on, on, on we'z a going, wizud! Come um up, back forth to um solum!" And with a hearty, beckoning wave, the hunch-backed goblin set hobbling off down the narrow hall.

Jon watched him go, a smile on his lips. _A friend. _The thought glowed in his chest, soft and warm. Isolated in the frigid heart of alienatory Alinor, the only man in a hundred miles or more, he had found a friend. Against all odds, from the unlikeliest quarter imaginable, came comfort. A friend. And from the friend, hope.

He looked down at the rosy crystal in his palm, the assumed repository of every intricacy of an ancient apprentice edaphomancer's stud, the key to the lock of one facet of Altmeri sorcery – albeit an obtuse and unglamorous facet. Hope. Hope that he might actually unravel some useful element from edaphomancy's innards; hope that a basis in one of the less complex fields of Altmeri thaumaturgy might lend itself well to the accomplishment of the greater; hope that he might achieve something useful and valuable despite this intentionally insulting agricultural assignment; hope that not all intimacy was lost, not all togetherness was gone, not all friendship forsaken. Hope that he might one day know Love anew.

"Wizud?" came the goblin's querying voice from the end of the hall. "Wizud, come um up! You'z so werily slow!"

"Coming!" called Jon, but did not. Instead he smiled a moment longer down at the crystal the goblin's greatness had given him, wondering just how much it would reveal to him, in time, and just how much he would owe to one short, hunch-backed, shuffling, great-hearted little goblin. He chuckled at the irony of it all, and then set off at last down the dim hallway toward the gleam of its egress, stumbling over the lightness of his own feet. And, together, the two of them went on in that way through Patala's interminable white-walled halls; went shuffling and stumbling and humbling their fumbling way back to the musky moistness of the solum's webbed soil-stone; in budding friendship in excited anticipation, in happiness, in hope; in all the mingled uncertainty and questing confidence of two lives newly intertwined.

From solitude, friendship. From friendship, hope. From hope, happiness. From happiness, curiousity. Thusly did three quiet, timid, brave little knocks change Jon's life. Falif returned that day to his duties as a manservant, to his preparation of Jon's breakfast of blueberries and frittered corn, to the role he had shed for the morning's expedition, but Jon – Jon returned to himself.


	18. Chapter 17

**Chapter XVII**

Dispatch to the Assemblage of Provincial Oversight  
College of Whispers, Miscarcand Cynosure  
Dynamistographic Transcription of Urfe's Seventh Harmonic Spectra-Sphere  
Date: 5 Sun's Height, 4E XXX

Barring the possibility that my dynamistograph has been dismantled in disgruntlement at the pessimism so evident in my last report, or at the inexcusable interval between that report and its predecessor, I repose in confidence that this report finds the Assemblage both hale and hearty for another rendition of "Alien Alinor: a Human's Harrowed Tale."

It has been a fruitful month for me here in Arbasdiil - which as the Assemblage will of course recall, is the central solum of the Kemendelia, Alinor's exclusive agricultural society, and exists under the absolute direction of that organization's head edaphomancer, the ancient Altmer known as Tsirelsyn. While I have not yet managed to obtain further interview with this entity, or, indeed, with any other fully-fledged soil-sorcerer, or to decipher the inner aetherial mechanics of their thaumaturgy, I have nevertheless succeeded in gathering gads of vital information on the nature – or rather, the artifice – of Altmeri agriculture, the composition and coordination of the sola, and the specific functions of a portion of soil-sorcery's spellwork, if not the method of their accomplishment. I have toured the glass bridges and obsidian pylons overhanging the vast, sharp-stepped fields – but of course the Assemblage knows of this, and of Alinor's agricultural obtuseness, already. What the Assemblage does _not _know, however, _cannot _know, is what I myself have only so recently learned; that the agriculture I have seen and shared and criticized is only the most superficial of the Kemendelia's aspects. And I mean that quite literally; for you see, in Alinor agriculture is not limited just to Nirn's surface. No; in Alinor, agriculture extends deep, deep down into her very flesh.

I speak of the true purpose of the sola. This double-dozen of the Kemendelia's facilities pocks the terraced land of the city-isle in its every major region, serving as hubs for the enactment of agronomic activity, such as it is, in the surrounding cropland, but more than that, the sola are themselves massive conglomerations of productive substrate. And here, perhaps, we finally begin to see a real, _practical _use for edaphomancy, for it is the weavings of the soil-sorcerers that have allowed the creation of these constructs. Each solum takes the form of a massive invagination in the city-isle's bedrock, a well filled with soil enchanted and generated by edaphomancy and kept similarly moist. The solum is in fact constructed of this magical 'soil-stone;' the edaphomancers' enchantments keep this soil structurally sound despite its friability and its use as a substrate for production. And in this way have the elves constructed a series of enormous subterranean agricultural facilities; layer upon layer upon layer of enchanted soil-stone ledges, lush with cultivation; innumerable extending stacks for each, stretching deeper into Nirn than perhaps any others save the Dwemer have delved. But this is useless for agriculture, you will say; only a few specimens in any category of life have ever been found capable of survival without the benefit of the light of the sun; it cannot be that the Altmer have developed such a trait into a crop for large scale production. An underestimation, I would say, of the elven capacity for artifice unrestrained by any sense of the natural order of things, but nevertheless true; the Kemendelia has not, to my knowledge, created or discovered an agronomic organism capable of survival without light. They did not need to. Because in Alinor, the sun dwells ever below the horizon.

I begin to see the genius of what I once thought absurdly phenomenal effort to no real purpose. Alinor's system of aerial roadways seemed at first ridiculous, preposterous; a paramount example of reflexive elven artifice, but now I see that I was wrong. Those glassy paths and black-bodied pylons _have _a purpose beyond alienation from the grit of Nirn. They are conduits, drinking in the golden light of day and channeling it down deep into the depths of Patala (as they call the system of tunnels and shafts of the sola and the labyrinth of passages interconnecting them through the city-isle's bedrock) along their innumerable knotty veins; like roots seeping sustenance to their fungal friends. This is the luminous rhizosphere of the city-isle; amber light like the first burst of dawn trickling into Patala's flesh and suffusing the sola with its nourishing sap. It is my recommendation that the Assemblage immediately designate one or more of our material magicians to the replication of the substance capable of such a transfer; there is no telling to what uses it could be put in humanity's hands. Perhaps the elves themselves have uses for it beyond the lighting of their underground growth complexes, but if so they have thus far eluded my observation. Regardless of the substance's possible other functions, the Assemblage will no doubt see its power; to light the earth, and in this way enable an unprecedented expansion of production, far beyond anything the Empire's current technology could allow. And in case the Assemblage should doubt the veracity of my statements due to a source's misrepresentation in its acquisition, allow me to provide reassurance: I have seen Arbasdiil's subterranean fields myself. They are quite real, and deeper than you could possibly imagine. I have not yet had the opportunity to ascertain _how _deep, or what lies at the bottom, but the Assemblage may repose in confidence that I _shall _do so at the first opportunity.

The existence of this 'subsurface agronomy,' as we might call it, has interesting implications for superficial Alinorian agriculture. While, as the Assemblage knows, elven agronomy as seen thus far has been astoundingly backward and obtuse, not even segregating one crop from another but allowing all to grow will-ye nill-ye together, lacking anything resembling discernment, subsurface elven agronomy seems not to share such blatant oversights. In the solum's soil-stone depths there is no such neglect of cultivation, no intermingling of crops; all is kept tidily together for ease of care and harvest. Indeed, from what I have seen so far the elves take their subsurface practice to the opposite extreme; a single crop dominates the entirety of Arbasdiil's stacked soil-stone (or at least as much as I saw, which I will grant has not been particularly extensive). Thus, a postulation: the Kemendelia does not use the surface of the city-isle for agriculture. For horticulture, perhaps, but the true agriculture is carried out in the subsurface of the sola. Each of the twenty-four is devoted to a single crop, and seeds all its innumerable layers of enchanted soil with that single crop. In this way, via the utilization of specialization, the Altmer produce enough food to feed their people despite their superficial bungling. It doesn't quite gel with what Odfrin told me about Altmeri culinary culture, but perhaps she was misinformed. Or perhaps my theory requires refinement.

Regardless of my postulations, the fact remains that the majority of Arbasdiil, at least, by my current information, is indeed given over to the cultivation of a single plant, and this is that known as 'haoma,' a foreign vegetable characterized by a narrow, broom-branching growth pattern almost like that of evergreen mistletoe and having a bulbous fruit resembling a fleshy, sappy artichoke. I was not given any more opportunity to examine it in depth than I have been given to study any of the rest of Alinor's rural botanicals – recall that to actually traverse the fields is forbidden, except to edaphomancers – but from what I _could _tell, this 'haoma' belongs to no class of flora that I have encountered anywhere on Tamriel. Thusly, the Assemblage will forgive me for refraining from further postulation; I have absolutely no idea why the Altmer should need so much of this single strange plant, no idea whether it is the fruit that is harvested or the stalk, the roots, the leaves, or some other segment of its anatomy entirely. It bears further study.

In addition to this insight beyond the superficiality of Alinorian agriculture, my studies here in Arbasdiil have also begun to shed light on the uses of practical edaphomancy and the structure of the Kemendelia's organization. The Assemblage knows already one of the functions I have discovered – the creation of enchanted earth, or soil-stone, which is simultaneously structurally sound and fertile as a substrate for production – but I have more yet to share. I have this in spite of the difficulties I have encountered in obtaining interviews with the soil-sorcerers themselves. My information does not come from an edaphomancer at all, but from one less likely to misrepresent the nature of the craft: from an edaphomancer's apprentice.

The organization of the Kemendelia is far more complex than I had first imagined. Indeed, at first brush the very idea of a centralized body overseeing all aspects of agriculture seemed to me both superfluous and silly; human farmers oversee every facet of their production without regulation, inspection, or any other form of oversight and have done for millennia. What true need could the elves see for such formalized interference? What _space _could they even see for it? What, do they have one department devoted to the optimization of pre-harvest activities, another for the post, a third for product storage, and so on and so on? Given the amount of bureaucracy that must inherently be involved in such a system, I could not imagine that it could possibly function efficiently and effectively, and so I assumed something simpler; that the Kemendelia was but a thinly veiled communal scheme to jiggle the profit out of the pockets of the small time land owners and into those of the overseers; i.e., the edaphomancers.

In some senses I was correct. The Kemendelia is indeed subdivided into many specialized professions – more even than I had imagined – but, given the evidence of successful, incredibly large-scale production that I have seen below Alinor's superfice, I cannot say that the system is inefficient. Likewise was my assumption on the rapacious, self-serving nature of the system in error, for its premise was false; there are no small-time land owners and agriculturalists in Alinor. The city-isle's rural districts number one for each solum, and the lands of each are owned entirely by the resident edaphomancer or edaphomancers. Individuals may of course possess homes built into the terraced hillsides (miraculous architecture, by the by) but every last bit of soil-hosting land lies in the hands of the soil-sorcerers. In some sense I suppose this is an expression of the proprietary instinct characteristic to so many highly specialized and skilled sects of any arcane society; woe be unto the hapless young apprentice what attempts to use the Secret Stage as a practice ward in its off hours; the thaumaturgical thespians have him by the ears in minutes, his features never to quite return to their old, unexaggerated expressions; or to the washerwoman who uses the pond of narcoleptic narcissus for her work – the Dibellites always do awake sooner or later from their thrashing-limbed, self-absorbed wet-dreams , and there is no mercy in them for the fat, hard-armed old woman sudsing up their downy-limbed refllections. No doubt it is much the same with these edaphomancers. They have, no doubt, total power over all of Alinor's soil; why should they deign to allow anyone else to pretend they own what they so fully control?

It could only ever be a pretense, even if it were allowed. In Alinor-rural, the edaphomancer rules absolutely. Every segment of the Kemendelia is subject to their direction; from the seed-given silviculturist to the grain-groveling gyrovague, the arcane agronomist to the ethereal entomologist, the master mycologist to the bubble-burdened horticulturist, the meteomancer to the pyramidal pathologist and on to a hundred more disciplines of ever increasing specialty for which the languages of men have no names. In every one of these is the hand of the edaphomancer, poking and prodding and demanding that all practices conform to 'what is best for the soil;' i.e., to their will, for how sensitive can a degraded mineral mass truly be? The extent of the interference is truly incredible to me. The soil-sorcerers involve themselves in quite literally every facet of the agricultural procedure, down to the minutest of details. And more; they have somehow managed to make the rest of the organization _thankful _for the interference! My source cites it as their very function, of all things, 'to coordinate and collaborate with all areas of agricultural arcana and act thus as the binding thread, sealing all together in conscious, contemplative interdependence.' How the dirt magicians managed to inveigle their way into _that _sweet role I'm sure I don't know, and equally sure that they won't be sharing the secret.

For all this paramount agricultural tyranny, though, the edaphomancers do not seem to be exploiting Kemendelia society overmuch. Each of the many specialized professions within the organization serves its role for the greater good of the whole, but yet reaps a substantial private benefit. The edaphomancers cannot exist without their extensive support network, and in the realization ensure that that support network is kept satisfied. The edaphomancers do not even oversee or direct the shipping and sale of their own product, leaving that and the weighted profit distributions to third-party freight agencies; every part of the Kemendelia gets a cut. It is almost as though the Kemendelia itself owns the land and its profits, almost as though it is more truly a communal society than traditional, and yet the ownership and mastery of the edaphomancers remain, as does the individual agency of each subsection and its component parts. There is only one section of the society that truly loses, and _that _is unavoidable by definition. I speak, of course, of the Kemendelia's farm hands; of the goblins.

It is my fervent hope that this last statement has not been met with scoffs, jeers, or incredulity from any among the Assemblage, but I will admit that I would not be surprised if it has. For you in Cyrodiil have such little exposure to this race. In Cyrodiil's communal mind they are but beasts, monsters, savages living in a primitive tribal semblance of society in the caves and ruins hidden throughout the Heartland's often impenetrable verdancy. They are but creatures that raid our villages and slay the travelers of our roads, nothing but monsters to be raided and slain in turn. They have no intellect, no civilization, no discernment, and no capacity for refinement. They are a hideous blight, to be exterminated if possible and suppressed out of sight and mind if not. This is the common view. Indeed, it is the view to which I subscribed before coming to Alinor, where the goblin race is everywhere evident. It is a view of grave error, and graver injustice. It is simply, unarguably, false. Goblins are not beasts. They are people, just as much as you or I or an elf of Alinor. They are not monsters, but sensitive, feeling individuals the same as we. And if they seem dull and uncouth, it is only because they are uneducated; the same symptoms can be found in any squalid hole of Cyrodiil's slums. I have spoken with them, here, and found them to be both friendly and astute, albeit not particularly well versed in Tamrielic. To view them as anything other than a sentient race equal to any other is to commit a grave moral error and to tragically limit ourselves with the bounds of our own prejudice. Bizarre and uncivilized they may seem, at first, but if I have learned anything throughout my travels of Tamriel it is that there is no true, objective standard of civilization. Any repulsion I might initially have felt for some cultural practices was a failure in me, not in the people. That I could not immediately apply this philosophy to the goblins of Alinor is testament to the power of ingrained assumption. So inculcated was I with humanity's prejudice against the goblin race that I could not at first even think of them as rational, feeling individuals. I overcame this inculcation only by virtue of a severe shock, so the Assemblage will understand that I do not expect them to stand up and lobby for goblin rights. For now, I shall stand alone at the goblin liberation front.

Moral agenda aside, it cannot be denied that the goblins of Alinor have a poor lot. Oh, yes, they are well fed and comfortably housed, but only because they themselves are out doing all the brute force work to feed the island, slaving away in the sola's subterranes, and perhaps even around the fields above, carrying out who knows how many necessary but unglamorous physical tasks; enabling with sheer sweat and muscle all of Alinor's artifice. The entirety of the city-isle rests on the bent green backs of its slaves. There is no such thing as a free goblin. They are not citizens. They are resources to be utilized in the most efficient way the elves can devise; which is to say, kept healthy, happy, and dumb, brainwashed into contentment with their unrelenting automatic toil, but certainly not capable of enlightenment or advancement in society. Granted that none of Alinorian society is particularly upwardly mobile, but at least the elves have the advantage of physical similarity with their betters, and thus ease of assimilation. 'Goblin' is a caste unto itself, and immutable; there can be no mistaking one of the stubby, hunched, bulbous-skulled beings for anything save what they are.

But do not mistake me; I make no criticism of the Kemendelia for this injustice. It is not because of the Kemendelia that Alinorian society is so stratified, nor that all of Tamriel stands arrayed in prejudice against goblins. The edaphomancers reap benefits from their slaves, but no more than the rest of their people. The fault lies with Alinorian society as a whole for endorsing slavery of any kind. But even there I cannot condemn, for, again: the entire world hates goblins. To expect the elves to do otherwise would be foolish and unrealistic. And for the edaphomancers' privilege, well – as much as it does seem that the soil-sorcerers have simply duped their way into a position of absolute power, I do not think we can say with certainty that this is the case. It may be that the soil-sorcerer truly do perform the functions for which they are credited, nebulous and hemi-mystical and unlikely as they are.

… a statement which only makes sense if the question 'What does an edaphomancer profess to do?' has been answered in full. Very well, then; I proceed.

Elven society takes the peculiar view of seeing all things as born directly from the soil itself, not from their parents or progenitor plants; it is in the soil, the elves say, that life is incubated, and only superficially in womb of flesh or husk. In this sense, then, agriculture is the profession of the midwife, the oversight of the birth of each generation of vegetation into this world from its earthy womb. This philosophy is reflected in the title of the society itself – Kemendelia – which means, literally, 'soil-offering' (and incidentally is the word for agriculture itself, as well). They are the caretakers who guide, protect, and oversee that which the soil offers up. If we can take this philosophy seriously for a moment – which we must, for the elves do so in every moment – I think we can see why the edaphomancer is so important in Alinor. Every other craft and profession concerns itself only with those things which Nirn produces; only the soil-sorcerer can say that he understands and manipulates Nirn herself, fount of all things. Herein lies edaphomancy's claim to the position of keystone of all Alinorian agriculture. Soil is the element common to all areas of agriculture – and in that light, the edaphomancers' entanglement with each of those aspects makes perfect sense. Though concerned primarily with nascence, the edaphomancer must yet trouble himself with the realization of potential, as well as its infinitive, for the two cannot be extricated from one another. That which is on the soil has just as much effect on that within it as that within it has upon that which is on it. Thus, the edaphomancer must govern the interplay of production's effect upon the soil and the soil's effect upon production, and to do that must be involved in every step of the procedure. The question of _why _such painstaking care is necessary is one I cannot as yet answer; it seems ridiculously superfluous in my mind. Soil is a simple mineral mass, not a fragile womb.

The sum total of an edaphomancer's profession, then, is as has been stated; to interfere in those of others, and in this way ensure the suitability of all practices. They call this bistrra, which is a derivative of the Aldmeri word meaning 'to knot' (also related to a word for a soil-specific hue), and see themselves as mystical weavers, binding the soil and the people and the actions of both together into one healthy, productive whole. Indeed, as far as I can tell this is the very nature of their sorcery; to bind one thing to another. Every action they take in their daily interference is perceived to be an exercise of this sorcerous power, and seems to be the primary goal of the discipline. There may be more concrete expressions of soil-sorcery, such as the enchanted, permeable, friable subterranean soil-stone of the sola, but if this is the case then I have not as yet encountered it.

To sum up my findings thus far: elven society views the soil as the mother of all things, the Kemendelia is a clan of midwifes, and edaphomancers wield nebulous needles to weave together that within the soil and that without. And thus the Assemblage will understand my skepticism of the entire system; it is too ridiculous. Soil is a _mineral mass _from which plants receive structural support and a measure of necessary nutrients, and nothing more. That Alinor believes otherwise seems to me evidence that the edaphomancers have them all deeply duped. That being said, I may still be wrong; my source declined at our first meeting to provide any more technical information on the craft, seeming hesitant to reveal its inner workings without first providing an overview of what it is edaphomancers do. It is my hope that he will prove more forthcoming at our next interview.

This concludes the body of my report. However, I would like to add a tail and use it to beat in my not-so-subtle moral agenda once more. The College of Whispers is one of a very select few institutions of education in all of Tamriel. We have the power of understanding at our disposal, to distribute as we see fit, to anoint with knowledge those applicants we choose. It is my belief that this is a power we must utilize with the greatest of cares. We must use it to better the world. We must not hide behind the veils of mystery and reclusion that have become so much our norm, but spread our knowledge to the world, for the betterment of all. And so the Assemblage knows what I will say: that the College of Whispers should enroll a goblin student. We must be the ones to extend the hand of friendship and the light of knowledge, or eventually someone else will do so. Perhaps even the Synod. It would truly be a shame if our ecclesiastical counterparts preempted us on the harvest of an entire crop of potential sorcerers; paramountly pathetic if Tamriel should see an entire race indoctrinated into monastic mystery when we _could _instead have initiated them into properly secular scholarship. But of course it is not my place to tell the Assemblage my thoughts on the direction of the College as a whole, nor is it the Assemblage's place to take those thoughts to the Dean and her corollaries. But we must all do what we must do.

So for now, then, I express my deepest hopes that you have enjoyed this latest rendition of Alien Alinor, and say to you: good night, fair audience, and may your hearts speak truth in your dreams. As always, this is,

Jon Urfe

Specialist in Poly-Spectral Comprehension Techniques and Phenomena

Collegiate Ambassador to the School of Thoughts and Calculations and the Aldmeri Dominion in Alinor

College of Whispers


	19. Chapter 18

**Chapter XVIII**

I didn't really lie, you know. It was more of an omission. Not a lie. Everything I said was true. Completely so. Unalloyed, undiluted, unmitigated fact. Clean as a new-born babe. Absolutely nothing to be worried about. I mean, I never said my source _wasn't _two thousand years dead, did I? No. No, I did not, and I also never said that he was currently alive. So that's covered. I made no claims. If they happen to misunderstand, happen to think that I said something I didn't, well, that's on them, right?

A good joke, Jon. A ridiculous joke. I know they will not accept that excuse. If the Assemblage ever discovered that I misrepresented something like that I would be stripped of my accolades in an instant. It's no small matter, academic dishonesty, even in something as relatively removed from academia as these reports. Perhaps I could chalk it up to imperfect translation in the dynamistograph, if it ever did come to trial. It isn't as though I could have done anything else, anyway; I am most certainly _not _ready to reveal the true nature of my source. The implications of it would completely unhinge from the frame of reason the Assemblage's flightier members. I need to stay focused, not distract myself with the demands of gibbering, mercury-minded, aluminium coiffed old crackpots. At any rate, there is no reason they should ever catch the truth's wind; with any luck whatsoever I will have my information verified and updated by first-hand field work before my departure, and once I'm back in Cyrodiil who's to say that it didn't come from a living apprentice edaphomancer? So that's that.

… then again, perhaps it _was _a lie. Considering the difficulties in interface this comprehension crystal has given me thus far, perhaps I really _won't _have an edaphomancer's apprentice as source, live or dead. Or any source at all. I just don't understand it. My Mangler interfaces with it perfectly, I can establish a codependence recursion successfully, but any actual application of idioplasmic radiation sends the whole spectral series into massive oscillation, as though I can't hit one coding region without the effects vibrating through to the others. But more than that; there's another dimension to it. It feels – rounded in multiplicity in my mind, like the character of the resonance bone is itself oscillating, and thus changing the potentiality of the emitted comprehension spectra. But no, that's not really good enough. An image. Then: if one could make tuning forks of nesting dolls, enchant the nesting dolls to vibrate between various states of physical composition, and then hit that telescoping, oscillating resonator with a golden hammer, it might sound something like the spectra feel in my mind when I begin my tinkering with this crystal. I've never encountered anything like it. Well – no. Yes, but no. At least the first shell of the matrix-bone did seem to stabilize enough to acquire a blurred, low-fidelity reading after multiple swiftly successed strikes – enough to extract the information in the report I etched earlier, anyway – but it's still nowhere near as clean as it should be. It doesn't make sense; both the Mangler and this edaphomancer's comprehension crystal are of Ayleidoon origin; they should function perfectly together. That they do not is… troubling. If it turns out that I _cannot _use this comprehension crystal to learn the inner workings of edaphomancy… well. At that point I would be forced to go straight to its wellspring, and despite all the ways life is looking up right now, I am not yet ready to do that.

Again. Same thing. Gah, this is going to take some time. Speedier now, yes, having caught some of the trick of it, but still slow. I wasn't really ready, information-wise, to write a report at all, but after three solid days at work on the damned thing I _was _ready to submit some results, dammit, even if they _were _inconclusive blather framed by a poorly disguised agenda. I'd have chosen something different if I could have, but an introduction to the nature of edaphomantric functions and the setup of the Kemendelia was the first lesson my poor Ayleid fellow got himself, on arrival, or at least the first he recorded. I wasn't kidding when I said the edaphomancers were reluctant to break anything big too fast; they brought this ancient fellow in by tiptoes and baby steps. I guess they don't think that understanding is something to be rushed; a characteristic elven viewpoint, damn those millennial lifespans anyway. The next layer seems more promising, but at this rate it will be some time before I can get it truly analyzed. Gods, but why did I leave my prismatic spectroscope in Cyrodiil? An inverse transform alignment would be perfect; compile a spectrum of the emitted spectra. I've got a few bits and pieces lying around that I might be able to cobble together into something rudimentary, but it wouldn't be enough. I put priority on my impressionable interstice collection; I thought I'd be working on espionage, not anything this involved. Foolish, perhaps, from a mage sent to study with and spy on the best wizards in the world, but then we weren't really expected to _help _them with their research, just to understand and steal what they already have. And I'd be surprised if we can do anything resembling the grand intellectual confiscation the Assemblage envisioned, considering that we've been here for months and still haven't met a single member of the School of Thoughts and Calculations. I'll get what I can from the edaphomancers, but I doubt it'll satisfy.

Though – Mother of gods, that stings like hell _every time _– I suppose I don't really know whether or not that's true, anymore, lacking communication with Odfrin and the rest. Definitely something else I should have thought of; identity tokens for each of us, and I'd have been able to keep in touch despite this assignation. I'd have been able to talk to Odfrin. I still could have, I suppose, but lacking the proper salt slurry for crystal growth I'd have had to use something lesser as the resin for the codependence recursion, and nothing but my make-up holds that kind of mangling stably. Odfrin would have had to rework it on her own every time, and she truly did not show enough aptitude for that to have been feasible. Not to blame her, of course; very few _do _show an aptitude for it, even among those with the talent innate.

I remember – the memories rise up now in every moment, like bubbles trapped in amber; eternally frozen in motion – I remember explaining something of my craft to her, once. It must have been just a few days after our first conjugation, because I know I was still maintaining the farce of living in the room with Miles. We were in bed late one morning, snuggled together in the mangled covers and our tangled bodies after a sweet'n'slow flexing of dawn desire, the enchanted lattice fires along the walls a simulacrum of the rising sun behind a maze of curtains. She sprawled with her arms thrown abandonedly above her head, milky chest bare and bold, hair like scraggled golden twine. She watched me with eyes half-closed, cheeks dimpling contentedly as I sat up, fastening my black silk eye patch across my head.

"I like that," she said suddenly.

I blinked. "What? My patch?"

"Yes," she said, nodding. "It makes you look – dashing. Rogueish. Not that I'm glad you have to wear it, of course, but since you do anyway it's good that it looks good on you."

"Well, thank you," I replied with a bemused chuckle. "I'm glad you like it. Is it a rogue you were looking for, then?"

She laughed. "Of course not," she said. "Rogues are like actors; great for parties and a wild night, but not really what a woman looks for in a long-term man." My stomach jumped, but I said nothing. She knew anyway, of course; her eyes twinkled, and she bit her lip as if to say, 'Why yes, I did just say that. You're not dreaming at all.' What she actually said, though, was, "There's no denying they've got the looks down, though. So you can steal their sense of style all you like."

I shook my head, laughing quietly. "I'll see what I can do."

We fell silent as I slid back under the cover of a goose-down comforter, propped up on an elbow to watch the wet beat pulsing in the hollow of Odfrin's throat. I trailed circles across her stomach with the tip of a finger. We stayed that way for a time, trading caresses with eyes and skin, blinking slow languor. Odfrin's fingers scumbled across my scalp, ruffling through my hair.

"Do you – mind?" she asked softly, slipping aside the strap of my patch. The cloth fell slack and empty to the sheets.

"I don't mind," I answered, "but it tends to unnerve people."

"Not me." Her pale eyes searched the pocked, scar knotted hollow where my eye had once been without flinch or qualm. "How – does it bother you to talk about it?"

I hesitated. "Well – yes. A bit. I don't mind too badly the lack, but its taking is… disturbing to recall."

"Why?"

I laughed dryly. "Remembering the skewering of _your _eye wouldn't disturb you?"

She plucked at my hair remonstratively. "Of course it would. But you know that I know that there's more to your discomfort than that."

A slow twitched smile. "I suppose I do. You must never forget not to remember to remind me that I cannot evade you so easily."

"You can rest easy on that. So elaborate?"

It was a question; for all her refusal to allow my avoidance, she would not make me answer if I truly did not want to do so. And of course this is the most effective way to invite a confidence; the technique of a true master. I did not resist.

"It's just – well, I suppose in one sense it is odd that it is so difficult to talk about," I began, shrugging my shoulders as I eased over onto my back. "It wasn't horrible in any way – or at least not in any way immediately obvious, beyond the given fact that _my eye witnessed its own destruction's rise. _It wasn't something done to me by abductors or abusers. It wasn't long or painfully drawn out – in fact I was struck immediately unconscious after the lancing; I awoke three days later in bed, completely treated and bandaged up. I had to suffer through almost none of my own wound. My parents bore the stress and the care of me, not I."

"So in that sense it was very easy, by objective standards," I said. "If such things exist, of course. But in another sense – well, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. And I can't even explain why. When I think on it now – a searing whiteness. A rushing like the collapse of an aquatic cavity. Lancing pin-prickles. A keening, climbing, oscillating shriek of frequency-bound blood through my brain. A squirming, at the back of the socket. Panting in my ears, wheeze in my chest. Grit on my cheek, grit under my nails, grit ground in my eye. The smell of a woman. And then, a wrench, and aching emptiness. My interminable terror, replayed again and again in that dreaming star-void. Like the overlay of so many colors and sounds supersaturated into the indistinguishability of terrible brilliance and overpoweringly incomprehensible tone clusters, split waves on the order of the picotrichous. Unending. Terrifying. And after, when I was conscious again, my rising gorge and my twitching, spasming muscles, my helplessly flickering remaining eyelid."

I heaved a breath; my stomach was half-clenched in resurgent experience. "An influx of magicka to the brain, probably, with unpredictable consequences. At least that is how the College's Illusionists have explained it to me. So I guess I lied when I said I didn't know why it horrifies me so much. And doubly so, for I think I can add my own explanation." I paused, swallowing back queasiness. Always. Always, that time – it returns. I can't – there's just something about that moment. It won't rest. It drags me back. Always.

Odfrin's palm spread softly across my stubbled cheek. "Your own explanation?" she questioned gently. "Will you?"

I sighed past my clenched abdomen once more, hard and fast. "Yes," I forced out. "Yes. For you, I will."

"I think it's because it was so normal. There was nothing unusual about the day. There was nothing unusual about me, then. I was just a little boy out in his father's cracking red fields, poking and prying more in his own imagination than in anything in the real world. And then – fate, I guess. Something from the stars, though there were no stars; the sun was hot as white iron overhead. Fuh- ate." I choked on the word. "Or some demon's machinations, though perhaps there is no difference. But more likely chance. I think it was chance. Chance, that I tripped over my own feet that day, and stumbled forward in the blazing sun. Chance, that that hard, rilled, cracked ochre earth, cleared of rice and drained for replanting, jumped up to meet my face with the heat and speed of a swung skillet. Chance, that a glint like the broken off arm of a fiery star flashed blind – blinding- blinding white. Chance that this skewered my eye, my brain, and my life."

My finger's clenched hard round ridged metal and slick crystal. My arm trembled. And then I flipped my Mangler out from beneath the covers, out from against my skin, its forever-home. It lay between us, fang of the sky; needle of the earth.

"This is it?" Odfrin asked hesitantly after a long, silent stare. Her fingers slipped from my head, hovered anxious delicacy over the crystal. "May I – touch it?"

I nodded. Her slim fingers plucked at metal edges of the gem's matrix uneasily at first, then slide close round in investigation.

"Ayleid," she breathed after just a second's sight. I nodded again.

"Ayleid," I repeated. "Undeniably."

"But – what is it?" she went on. "Is it enchanted? A small welkynd, maybe? Or just a jewel?"

"It isn't enchanted," I answered. "But it's also not just a jewel. More a manipulation of nature than a manipulation of unnature. I don't know what the Ayleids called it – I have never come across another of its kind, or a reference to it in any inscription – but I call it my Mangler."

Blue eyes glowed up at me, wide and staring. "Mangler?"

I eased the etched, translucent blue-white stone from her fingers and rubbed my own across its oh-so-well-known surface, its so intimately-acquainted edges, its fatally familiar tip.

"Aye, my Mangler. For to mangle is both to tangle and to mend. You know of the seamstress' seat of industry? A mangle, and solely for the creation of clean, smooth cloth from a mess of single strands. And yet the word means also to snarl, to tangle, to ruin with inextricability. And thus: Mangler, the terror-twister of my youth, and my most important tool."

She blinked, ice-pure eyes luminescent as the last star's frozen glimmer on a flashing morning's horizon. "A tool? What do you mean, Jon?"

" A tool," I repeated, frowning down at the shard in my fingers, grimly fond. "My most important tool. That which has enabled me to push my field, the arcana of comprehension, so much farther and deeper than anyone before me. That which the Illusionists would give anything to steal or duplicate." I chuckled darkly.

Warm fingers touched my wrist gently, and I looked up from my self-absorbed brooding and oblique mystifications.

"I don't understand, Jon," Odfrin said softly. "Why would the Illusionists want this piece of crystal? What does it do? Why is it so useful to you? What is it?"

My cheeks flushed faintly, and I pressed Odfrin's hand in apology. "Ah, I am not being very helpful, am I?" I said. "I am sorry, Love. It is a bad habit, but to some extent a product of the craft. Allow me to explain more clearly." I cupped her hands in my own, and laid the sliver of crystal in her pink little palms.

"You see, my craft is that of understanding," I began. "I deal with the magic of comprehension, which, yes, is normally the purview of the Illusionists. I've carved out something of a niche for myself, though, with the use of my Mangler and of some particular insights of my own. You see, the Illusory Orthodoxy (in other words, the philosophy to which most of the craft adheres) makes a dreadfully large assumption about the nature of communication: namely, that it is, simply, the transfer of discrete quanta of information between individuals. I have found this to be unequivocally false. Because we _cannot, _in fact, transfer _any _information _directly _– well, indirectly would be more accurate, but wait to see why – but we can only create representations which give rise to similar thought patterns in the recipient as in the producer, and thus _approximate _understanding."

She just stared. "Um. What?"

I smiled. "Oh, you know what I mean. You just don't realize it yet. It's the difference between actually speaking with someone and writing a letter; when spoken, the sound is received directly, but when written, the receiver must imagine the sound. The letter _gives rise to _an approximation of the response your voice would incite in the mind of the reader, but neither emits nor contains your voice itself. It's a manifestation of a more fundamental phenomenon, really. In the same way that your voice is not _really _in the letter, your thoughts are not _truly _in your voice. And, for those conjurers and Illusionists with the skill, a transferal of one's thought does not _really _contain one's _meaning, _whatever the orthodoxy claims. Thought, like all other modes of communication, is itself a tangible construct, but meaning, and, consequently, understanding, are not."

"So…" Odfrin mused, frowning down at the crystal nestled and glinting on the wrinkled yellow sheets between us, "then what you're saying is that the actual information itself isn't what we are exchanging when we communicate. Just representations of information. Yes?" I nodded. "Well… ok. But if understanding isn't something tangible, like a thought or a voice, then what is it?"

My face scrunched in consternation. "Well – well – mostly fallacy, really. I mean, we talk about meaning as something independent from communication, independent from the phrasing of our sentences, but still a _thing_. I don't really think that it is, actually. I think it's an action. Consider it this way: you've got some pattern of aetherial material in your head and your soul, which is really what your thoughts are. The point of communication is to take that pattern and reproduce it in someone else's head – which is ridiculously unlikely. Even a single thought is incredibly complex, composed of millions, billions of individual bits of ideoplasm. And what is the _meaning _of that pattern, even if you _can _get it, intact, into someone else's mind? Mm? Mm? Is the pattern itself the meaning? I say no, but rather that the effects that pattern produces are its meaning. Action, not existence."

Odfrin nodded, but said nothing, staring blankly down at the rumpled sheets between us and chewing her lip. After a long moment, she spoke.

"Do you really believe that, Jon? Do you really believe that meaning isn't actually in our words, or voices, or anything else? Even thoughts?"

I nodded, quirking an eyebrow inquisitively. Her fingers worried at a knot in one of the sheets. "I do. I may be wrong, of course, but even laying aside my experimental and technical experience with comprehension spectra, I have seen too much miscommunication, even in thought-to-thought interfaces, to believe that our words transfer what we truly intend. They are but constructs; catalysts, not vectors. Is it really so surprising?"

"Well… to be frank, yes, it is," Love answered in a small voice, not meeting my eyes. "The implications of the philosophy… Jon, you're saying that we never really understand one another, that we just create reactionary thoughts of our own in response to messages, that the messages themselves are entirely cut off from their maternal meanings. It's not what I would have expected from you. To think that you believe that what you and I have had together wasn't really a true connection, a true understanding between two people, but just the wishful, willfully misunderstood fantasies of two lonely, delusional people that have not touched and cannot ever truly touch one another – it chills my heart."

Alarmed, I stirred, slipping my arm around her back and drawing her flesh flush against my own. My throat hummed with the start of low, soothing explanations, but the forceful jerk of her head against my chest and the fingers on my lips silenced me before I could begin. "And I _don't _believe that you believe it," she said forcefully, glaring unflinchingly into my eye from just a few inches' distance. "I _don't. _How could you think that? I _know _you feel what I feel. I _know _it. What I _don't _know is why you talk like this. How can communication be questioned? We affirm it with every word."

"Odfrin," I rumbled softly as she broke off, frowning past me. "Odfrin, look at me." I cupped the back of her head through a mass of flaring golden frizz. Blue eyes met my black one, stubborn and hurt and afraid.

"I do not believe that communication is impossible, Odfrin," I explained gently. "I simply think that there is more to it than a simple, mediated transfer of information. Or rather, less to it than that. That is the crux of who I am, Odfrin. My Love. That I recognize that all communication is but a construct, and independent of the meaning that birthed it – and yet still gives rise to true understanding." Icy eyes frowned in thawing thought. I went on, lost in their crystalline depths and those of my own wonder.

"It's incredible, really. I speak to you now, and my words are completely split from the meaning I intend for them to possess. They are but artifacts. They are patterns written on the wind, as ultimately arbitrary as a madman's scribblings. _And yet you understand_. How? How is that possible? The answer to that question is so important, Odfrin. So important. It is what has allowed me to pioneer an entire field of magic hitherto undiscovered by man."

"Do you know about music?" I went on after a pause; the reply, a confused no. "Ah. Well, then I'll just tell you: pluck a string, and you create a note. A single note, we usually think, but in fact this is not the case; auditory extractions reveal the presence of a multiplicity of tones within a single note; a spectrum, in fact. It is the same with communication. Just as a single strike of a single string generates a range of tones, not just one, so too does a single exposure to a single unit of communication give rise to a range of comprehension in the active mind. When you see the word 'dog,' you think not of one dog, one supreme, definitive dog, but of all the dogs you have ever known, with differing degrees of dominance. Your overall conception, then, is a summation of all these individual conceptions which you associate with the word 'dog.' That is what I call a comprehension spectrum. And no one's comprehension spectra generated in response to the word 'dog' are exactly alike; based on your own personal experience, you think of different things than the speaker thought when he said 'dog.' All communication is like this. Each of us has our own, individualized language based on our own unique experiences. Still chilling, perhaps; but no, not, because each of our languages share, to differing degrees, in form."

"But you're arguing against yourself," Odfrin broke in. "If each of our languages shares in form, then how do we have individual languages at all?"

"It is unavoidable," I answered, "because none of us associate quite the same concepts with each word. But that's the key; we _associate concepts _with words; we do not encapsulate them. We don't receive a speaker's conception exactly, like a package, but hear the word and think of all the spectrum of things we know to associate with it. That's why we can't just talk with anyone in any language and understand without difficulty. If words transmitted, literally, a person's meaning, 'misunderstanding' would not be a word. A word is just a string that we pluck to elicit comprehension spectra in our listeners. And the reason it works – the reason all communication works – is because we are bound to the word itself. _Bound. _We are intrinsically entwined with the tangible expressions of our language, with the _sound _of it, the _feel _of it, the taste, the look. It creates us, just as much as we create it. We are codependent; the state of the form of a language relies upon the character of its speakers, just as the character of its speakers is dependent upon the state of the form of their language. The two are inextricably bound. One cannot be altered without altering the other as well. And that's the beauty of it. That's why it _works. _Because I am bound to 'dog,' and you are bound to 'dog,' and thus _we are bound together. _We are codependent upon the state of the word, as the word is codependent upon the state of us. And in this way, we can communicate. We can enmesh ourselves in one another. We can resonate with meaning. We can understand."

Odfrin still frowned, despite my flushed cheeks and excited eye. "So meaning resonates along the medium of words. How is that revolution-"

"No, no, no!" I laughed, squeezing her round arms. "It does not resonate _along _anything. The word is simply a construct which allows two individuals to become _independently _bound to one another, however transiently. After that link has been established, meaning resonates _directly _between the two. The word is no longer necessary. Its part is done."

"So linguistically-catalyzed telepathy."

"_Not," _I replied vehemently. "Not at all. Telepathy refers to a transfer of patterned ideoplasm between individuals, but that is not what I'm talking about. It's not that this link, this bond that arises during any successful communication, allows the _transfer _of information, but rather that it makes the state of each mind dependent upon the state of the other. It does not resolve comprehension spectra into a single concept, but rather skews the spectra of both toward a point of equilibrium. Of _both, _mind. Not just the receiver. With every communication, the understanding _of both receptor and emitter _is irrevocably altered. Perhaps I'm not being clear. I'm talking about a direct, mystical entanglement, independent of space and time, in which a change in one mind creates a change in the other regardless of differences in context – although it is often not necessarily the same change in both. Just linked. It's a manifestation of a force of nature, really. You see it everywhere, not just in communication. All around us, this force binds things together, for a minute, a second, or an eternity, and for that time the existence of each cannot be fully described without attention to the other."

She mulled that over for a long minute, blinking thoughtfully down at the glinting Mangler tangled in the sheets between us. Then she spoke, slow and musing.

"So… then let me see if I've understood this straight-wise. A word is just sound. Me speaking is just sound. It's just a thing, a physical thing. It has no meaning of itself. But because the speaker, who creates the sound, is – bound? Or entangled? – to the word, and the hearer is bound in the experience, the pair can become bound to each other independently of the word. For a while. Is that right?" I nodded. "So – so then what? So the word doesn't matter anymore."

"The word matters," I put in gently. "It is the catalyst for the creation of a comprehension spectra. The entanglement between communicants simply allows that spectrum to tighten in on a commonly held meaning – and keep in mind that the effect is also on the speaker, the writer; the emitter, as well as the receiver. No author's understanding of their own work is exactly the same after it has been read. Also keep in mind that this doesn't usually happen perfectly; there's almost always some variation between the comprehension spectra."

"Ah. And all this happens because the two are bound into codependence by this force of nature." I nodded again. Odfrin's frown deepened. "Well, OK then, I think I understand what you're saying, though I'm a bit curious to know where you're getting it. But what I really don't understand is – why does it matter? You get the same result in the end, right?"

I smiled. "It's important because it helps us guard against the failings of communication. Because I know that the meaning I take from your words is a spectrum, not a single spike, I can – sometimes, anyway – refrain from assuming that I know what you meant. Which helps relationships all around, I feel. But beyond that – well, perhaps not _beyond_," I amended, squeezing her tighter to me at the quirk of one narrow, ray-bright brow, "_in addition _to that, it's important because of what it lets us do. Well, what it let's me do, anyway; no other wizard has the knack and the tools for it, to my knowledge. It's important because this force, underlying so many different natural phenomena including communication, can be manipulated. It's important because of my Mangler." I nodded down at the crystal.

Odfrin blinked. "You said that before, that your – Mangler – was your most important tool. Why?"

"Because it lets me manipulate entanglement," I answered quietly. "That is its power. It binds, and unbinds. Like a needle, I suppose. Or a mangle, in both senses of the word. It is not enchanted, though; there is no soul-material whatsoever within it. It simply has some form of – I don't know – resonance, or sympathy, with this one law of nature. And that lets me manipulate that law. With my Mangler, I can entwine any two objects in a finely tuned state of entanglement, such that a specific change in one results in a corresponding but non-identical change in the other, no matter the distance between them. You see the application, I see," I said in response to the hopping of her white-gold eyebrows, "and, yes, it does in fact allow instantaneous communication, regardless of spatial or planar separation. That is how I will make my reports to the council back in Cyrodiil, when the time comes. I have a series of crystals – they're somewhere around here; let me go…" I sat up, craning my neck around the lump, shadowed mound of Odfrin's huge bed to the carpet-field of scattered clothes, towels, shoes, and underthings of mine and Odfrin's that had accumulated over what had been a somewhat… preoccupied few days. But before I could even locate the hammered brass case through which the Thalmor had so fruitlessly rummaged upon our arrival in Alinor, its dark silhouette came whirling and whistling toward my head. I was far too accustomed to my milk-skinned lover's telekinetic antics to even so much as flinch; I just held out my hands, palms up, and let the case settle into them, gentle as a falling feather.

"Why thank you, Love," I said with a smile as I laid the case across my knees and flipped up its brass buckles with a series of clicks. "You are most helpful."

"I try," she answered ironically as she sat up. The sheets slipped down to her waist, exposing her pale breasts, but she just sidled over and snuggled up against my arm, peering curiously down into the dark velvet interior of the case on my knees. "So you were saying about crystals? Are these the ones?" She pointed to the neat lines of polished, spherical blue-white crystals nestled into the darkly sheening cloth.

"Ah, yes, they are," I answered, refocusing from the momentary distraction of my woman's naked flesh pressed up against me. "Yes, these are what I call my spectral relays. Each is attuned – to be more technically correct we should say entangled – to a specific crystal (of an obscenely rare variety, naturally; I have to grow them myself, and by my own formula) a specific crystal specifically designed to be capable of the storage of thought forms; or rather, of comprehension spectra. When I go to write a report, then, I can use my Mangler to entangle myself with one of these," I held up one of the dully glimmering stones, "whereby I can etch a catalytic representation of my thoughts within its matrix. By its relationship with the spectra sphere back in my office in Cyrodiil, then, the spectrum of the thought is rendered simultaneously on the other side of the ocean."

"Ahh, I see!" Odfrin replied, nodding. "Clever, clever! Well, the elves won't have thought of _that, _now will they? Ooh, Jon, you don't know what you've done with this. Good job! But how will the Assemblage receive your message? Did you train them in how to read this form of communication before you left, Jon?"

"Oh no, no," I chuckled. "Not at all. Me, train the Assemblage? By Aetherius, no. No, I took care of that little problem much more reliably. I devised a machine capable of transcribing a version of my thoughts into physical text. It utilizes transient akashic flow from unbound spirits, unharnessed mental capacity from nearby minds, as well as the mental machinery of a dedicated processing soul held in enchantment chains to interpret my thought spectra in a variety of ways, select the most dominant, and parse that into definite words. So it's really another link in the communication chain, which isn't the best for fidelity, but, still, it does its job well. Far better and more reliably than anything else I've ever seen or heard about… at least with the mechanisms of memospores lost in the wreckage of the third era. I'm a bit fond of my dynamistograph, if you can't tell."

"Oh, I could," my woman replied with a dimple to a cheeks and an amused purse to her full lips. "But – 'dynamistograph'? What does _that _mean?"

I shrugged. "Oh, you know, it's just a standard overly obtuse technical portmanteau. 'Dyna,' from dynamic and dynamo, referring to power. 'Misto' just means mystic, and references the fact that the device uses spirits and excess mental energy to run. And 'graph' is just another way of saying 'write,' which is what the thing does. So together it means something like 'spiritually powered and operated writer.' Dynamistograph. Not too bad."

Odfrin's low chuckle buzzed across my skin as she pressed her soft round cheek against my arm. "Oh, no, not difficult at all." I frowned down at her, suspecting sarcasm. She bit her lip at me, though, so I relented and pressed a kiss to the crown of her head.

"So tell me, Mr. Pioneer-in-his-Field," she went on playfully, "what else is your Mangler good for? What else does it let you do?"

"Oh, lots and lots of things," I answered. "As many as you can think of, really. I've not come close to the limits of its usefulness, yet. I mean, just think; I've got a device that can link any two objects irrevocably, regardless of condition and distance. There are _so many _applications for that capability. That's why the Illusionists are so riled to get their hands on it. I've no idea if anything I use it for approaches its original intention, of course. But here; here's one example. This one will be _quite _useful, if we can ever get ourselves situated somewhere where the elves will be doing and saying interesting things. Here."

I tipped two small, lusterless grey bits of stone into her pink palms. She rolled them between her fingers, then looked up, puzzled.

"So what do they do?" she asked. "They feel funny. Sort of soft."

"An illusion," I answered. "They feel soft because your mind can sense their receptivity; they are in fact as solid in hand as any other of my crystals."

"Oh. So what sort of receptivity do you mean, then?"

I smiled, and there may have been a glimmer of the predator in the gleam of my teeth. "Receptivity to sound. They absorb and resonate with all sound to which they are exposed. When linked to a spectra-sphere – well, I think you can imagine what the result would be."

Her mouth fell open. "Why you sneaky sod – a remote transcription device?"

"Oh yes," I replied, grinning in open wolfishness, "remote transcription devices. All I have to do is link up one of these to a spectra-sphere and leave it in a discreet spot somewhere in one of the elves' chambers and – blim blam, I'll know everything said in a fifty foot radius for as long as I care to. And when I've gotten enough, its link with the spectra-sphere in hand will let me recall it right out of the installment. Clean and slick; no recovery mission."

"Well aren't you just wilier than a weasel in a whiskey barrel," she said, smiling dryly and nudging my arm. "But what happens if the elves discover the thing? They are fairly anal about their security scans, you know, in the academic arena. Or so I've been told. What if one of their sniffers senses your snooper?"

"That's the beauty of it, though," I answered without hesitation. "There's no magicka directly involved; it works purely on the application of natural principles. All their wariness to aetherial flux will help them exactly nil. These audio-impresionable nodes are completely undetectable on the standard magickal frequencies to which most witchsense attunes. And even if they were looking for species of entanglement; well, that stuff's all over, in varying strengths. It's a natural process; it's everywhere. It would take an extremely sensitive warlock, a master of the manipulation of this force more skilled even than myself to detect my engineered codependence states. Given that I only discovered this branch of pseudo-magic a few years ago, I find it highly unlikely that the elves have anyone skilled enough in it to fit the role. I am not worried."

"You should be," Odfrin said immediatel, and her voice was abruptly worried and dark; a cloud's obfuscation of the moon. "Because you're forgetting something, Jon."

I frowned, taken aback by her sudden change in tone. "Forgetting something?"

"Yes. You're forgetting your most important tool." Her fingers lifted my cold-glinting Mangler slowly before my eye. "This. This, which manipulates the 'force' upon which you depend. This, which is so blatantly of _elven _make."

I paused. She had a point. "That's true… though Ayleidoon, not Altmeri. Still, the two were not utterly sundered; we do not call the Ayleids 'Heartland High Elves' for nothing. You think Alinor may have its own class of specialists in my area, then?"

Odfrin nodded. "It's possible, at least. Never underestimate elves, Jon. Let your guard down for one second, and they will skewer you every time."

"I'll be careful, then. I've had a few thoughts on ways to keep the bond subtle, to prevent the subjects from acting as compiling catalysts; that is, from inciting interconnections between their environments and their partner. I'll try to develop that a bit more before I actually deploy anything. By all signs I've plenty of time left, anyway; the elves do not seem inclined to bring us into contact with the School any time soon."

"Oh, the _School,_" Odfrin scoffed. "Phaw for the School. I've said it before, and don't you remember? Bugger the School! You'll never find it. No one will. It is not to be found." Frown as fiercely as she could, Odfrin could not banish the dimples from her cheeks; they rendered her u-bent mouth cute, rather than cross.

"I do remember," I responded, gently curious. "You said as much… oh, I don't know when it was. But you did say it. What makes you think that, though? Why do you think the School so unattainable for us?"

She turned slowly, leaning ever so slightly back to blink up at me.

"Jon," she said, "I have been in this city for a very, very long time. Don't ask how long. I came here on the same premise as yours. I expected to make contact with the School of Thoughts and Calculations, the legend whose secrets we came here to steal, within a week, and to be ensconced in one or more of its laboratories within a month. I have yet to even identify a single one of its scholars. It's a trick, Jon. This whole thing. The Ambassadorial Enterprise; the academic partnership – a trick. The School does not and never did have any desire to collaborate with the College. I didn't tell you direct-and-face-it at first because, well, what good would knowing do you? You're still stuck here. At least the others have something to hope for, you know? Sorry to break that for you – but oh, it does feel good to have some to really share the plight with." And conversely, she giggled, and pressed her cheek happily against my arm.

"While I am quite happy to keep your company in any sense," I said, smiling down, "I'm not quite sure I can accept the idea that the School's invitation was nothing more than a trick. I mean, why would the School want to lure us here but not interact with us? It makes no sense. _No one _in Alinor wants us here."

"It seems like that, yes," agreed Odfrin, nodding, "but it isn't. Someone wants us here. The Thalmor wants us here."

"What!" I exclaimed, twisting around on the bed and staring. "The _Thalmor!_ That's ridiculous! The Thalmor hate humanity even more than does the rest of the populace! And you say they _want _us here! Cor! You're off it!" I ended with an incredulous laugh, giving Odfrin's soft waist a poking tickle.

"I am not off it!" she protested through a giggle as she fell back into the sheets, fighting off my hands with flailing arms and legs. A short struggle, writhing and sputtering with mirthful squeals later, and I ended up pinned between her thighs with the sheets bunched between us, my wrists trapped in the small of my back; she'd resorted to magic.

"That's not fair," I breathed, a few inches above her flushed face and chest.

"I don't know what you mean," she answered, her pale eyes sparkling. "You could use magic if you wanted. Go ahead. Try it." She flexed her thighs around my hips, and I let out a laughing groan.

"You know quite well that practical magic isn't my strongest skillset," I managed, "quite aside from your weavery of womanly wiles. I am routed; I admit it. You have me at mercy."

"Wise man," she answered, and the timbre of her deep alto shivered up my back. I held her eyes with my own; dilate swallowed the icy sheen bit by bit. She dimpled her underlip with round white teeth.

"What were we talking about again?" I mumbled.

"I don't remember," she answered. Her eyes had moved to my lips. "Whatever it was, though, it couldn't have been – oh! Oh, wait, yes, you said I was off it, you prune!" I blinked in surprise, and then disappointment; she was all focus and intellect again. She pushed me back up to a kneel between her legs, and arrayed herself busily into a reclining position against a mound of patched pillows, shamelessly bare-chested with the sheets bunched around the curve of her hips.

"I must inform you, Jon, that I am _not _off it," she began, folding her hands on her bare belly in a parody of primness. "You simply lack imagination. The Thalmor despise humanity, yes, this is quite true, and they despise us so much that they will do _anything _to see that we are finally destroyed – even bring us into their sacred homeland."

I frowned. "You think they brought us here to further their own long-term goals? But we don't even really know what those are."

"Oh pish posh on that, yes we do," she replied, waving a hand dismissively. "Yes we do know, and we've always known. Or at least we Nords have. They want to kill us, Jon. All of us. Down to the last Breton babe with a drop of Man-blood in his veins. They want to kill us so finally that we'll never come back, no matter how many times the World-Eater devours the Wheel. And if they have to use us in Alinor to make that happen, they will. They will take any means to their end."

"Hmmm," I mused. "Well, perhaps. They _did _seem strangely pleased with your performance the other night. The night's a bit fuzzy – well, the _dinner _is, anyway," I amended with a shared smirk, "but I think I remember Alusan bringing up the same possibility. But, still: what possible reason could the Thalmor have for bringing us here, if indeed they did? To what purpose could they put us?"

"Oh, I've no idea!" Odfrin exclaimed earnestly. "Not a single winkling! But I'm not an elf, either, thank Mara, so I wouldn't expect me to. And you're neither a bit of an elf, so don't expect you'll puzzle it out. They're _elves, _Jon. They're not like us. There's no way we'll understand their reasons."

I snorted. "You ought to know what I think of _that," _I said. "We're not so different as you might think. Even if we were, I've too much experience with divergent communication and the nature of comprehension to believe that we are incapable of understanding elves. I know for a fact that entanglement occurs between man and mer, so you'll not be convincing me on _that._"

Odfrin's soft laugh cut my vehemence short as she patted my knee. "All right, all right, oh Master of Comprehension," she said. "Try, if you want. Maybe you can. But remember, like Alusan said: such a thing, if possible, is terribly dangerous: for what if you take up _too much _of their thoughts in your seeking? You said yourself that understanding is a divalent resonance."

I nodded gravely. "There is always that. There is always that. But I will take care. I will take care." I fell silent for a long moment, looking down at the sheets across my legs, and seeing nothing. Odfrin's fingers twined comfortingly through mine, and I roused from my reverie.

"So do you think the School of Thoughts and Calculations exists at all, then?" I asked. "Or did the Thalmor invent the whole thing?"

"Oh, no, I don't think so," Odfrin answered. "No, the School is a real _thing, _it's just not a real _place. _And they probably don't even know we're here at all, much less that we're supposed to be working with them. I mean – "

"Wait, wait," I interrupted. "The School isn't a real place? How does that work?"

Odfrin's frizz-haloed head tilted slightly. "Oh. Sorry. I forget sometimes that you haven't actually been here all along. Well. Well, I suppose I can't _really _say this for certain, as it wasn't me who saw it – an older Ambassador, long gone; he was interested in communication too, actually – but the School doesn't exist in this space. It's in another entirely, and only accessible at certain points."

My eyebrows rose skeptically. "It exists. In another space. How so?"

"Oh, don't give me your Doubly-Dubious look, you," she scoffed, rifling a hand through my hair. "I'm being serious here. And you'll believe it soon enough anyway, because here: the space is the mind."

"The mind?" I said, taken aback.

"Yes, the mind. See? It's a – network, I guess you could call it. An interlinking of the thoughts, and, well, calculations, of all its members. A mental matrix. Or that's what I was told, anyway. Poor fellow didn't last long, after that."

I frowned at the ominous invitation of that last, but decided that that dangerous distraction was better left alone, for the moment.

"A mental matrix?" I mused instead. "Well, it's certainly possible. Telepathy is not uncommon, of coruse, but I've never heard of anything with the permanence that this – you said it's only accessible at certain points? What did you mean?"

"Oh, yes, the Strand," Odfrin affirmed with a nod. "That was the thing: that the scholars access their School through the Strand. That's how he discovered it, actually."

"The Strand?" I repeated, marveling at Odfrin's hitherto unfathomed knowledge of Alinor. "What is this?"

"Well, I don't know the technical name, but that's what he called it: the Strand. Fully, the Strand Library, but who cares about the full version? Strand is good enough. It's an enchanted construct of the elves, as I understand it. An interface, I guess, and for more than just minds to meet; they've got it hooked up to some kind of textual repository. Hence 'the Library' bit. At any rate, s'far as I know that's how most Altmer do their research, in Alinor; they just find one of these 'Strand interface' sites scattered around the isle and access the entirety of their peoples' national library remotely. Useful, but personally I prefer to have the real books on hand."

"Wow," I breathed, my brow jumping in spite of myself. "That is something, if true. I wonder how they're managing it? I mean, I've looked into this sort of thing before myself, but I've never been able to isolate a good transduction media. And the centrex? I never got that far, but there's no material, to my knowledge that correctly combines the characters of metallic memory and aqueus interception. You see, it would have to be something capable both of non-transient assumption of imparted spectral profiles _and _of mutating those profiles upon re-exposure to the – mmph mm mmm!"

My mouth was quite suddenly stuffed full with rough, dry cloth, and my ears ringing with Odfrin's giggles. I spat out the sheets with a forceful toss of my head, and flared sideways at the pink-cheeked Nord.

"Was that _quite _necessary?" I growled as she shuddered with bubble after bubble of sparkling giggles.

"Oh, yes, I think it was," she managed after a moment, dimples dazzling. "You know how you _do_go on if you're allowed to. I'm just here to make sure you don't break out in pompous pimples." She dissolved into laughter once more.

I snorted. "Indeed. Well, thank you for that, madame. I'm sure I would have been positively suppurating with pustules by now had you not stopped me."

"Oh don't be like that, Jon," she cried as I moved to crawl off the bed. "I didn't mean that I don't want to hear what you were saying. I was just being silly. I had an impulse." I stilled, crouched on the bad, my back to her. "_Don't _go away, Jon. I was just poking fun. You can muse about the Altmer and their Strand all you want. I promise I'll listen." A rustle, and then soft fingers stroked my shoulders, tentative and repentant.

"Ah, well," I relented, feeling a bit foolish for having taken offense at all, "I don't want to put you to sleep, or anything. And anyway it's all just speculation; I can't say anything for certain unless I actually see the thing for myself." I brought her hand down in front of my body and twined my fingers through her dainty digits against my curly-furred belly. "So never mind about it. I was silly to be upset, anyway."

Odfrin slid closer, pressing her bare chest snugly up against my back and nuzzling her chin atop my shoulder, pale legs wrapped around my waist. "You _could _actually see one, I think," she said quietly by my ear. "There's at least one here in the city. Maybe many."

"Do you know where?" I asked, perking up.

Her chin rubbed a negative into my skin. "No, unfortunately. At least not for certain. I only know where old Gregorio had been nosing about in the weeks before he finally came and told me about his 'discovery.' I can take you there, but there's no telling whether the Strand will actually be there."

I hummed quietly to myself for a moment, thinking. "It's worth a try," I decided. "Especially in light of the fact that it seems we'll never have anything else to do around here. You want to go today?"

"Today?" Her spine pressed a firm, slow, languid arch of flesh into my back. "I wasn't planning on doing much of anything today. It's nigh on half gone, anyway," she noted, waving to the lattice-fires behind her chambers tatter of veils; gone from morning's deep amber to a pale, diffuse daisy.

"So it has," I agreed with some surprise. "Now how did that happen?"

"We were too busy with each other to care about time," she answered, voice lowering. "Too busy learning who we are. Getting entangled in one another."

A fond smile creased my cheeks. "Ah, yes. Yes, we were. And that always does transcend time." She nodded against my back, and for a long while we simply sat there, together, warm and comfortable and easy, rocking gently back and forth, Odfrin's throat vibrating softly against my spine as she hummed a low love tune, her hands rubbing my chest and stomach in idle wander. She stopped, when the warmth of her presence had near-lulled me to sleep, and laid her chin atop my shoulder once more, lips poised near my ear. She spoke.

"Thank you, Jon," she whispered.

"For what?" I mumbled sleepily.

"For today. Last night… being here. With me. I… can't really tell you how much it means to me."

"Ah, Odfrin," I sighed. "There is nowhere else I would rather be than with Love. Than with you." I brought her hand to my mouth; pressed a soft kiss against her knuckles.

"Me too," she whispered. Her breath was hot against my ear. "But still, thank you. For that.. and for sharing so much of yourself with me today. Thank you for telling me about your eye."

I smiled gently. "There's no one I would rather share that story with," I said quietly. "Remember: you have all of me. There is nothing that is me that is not yours."

And the only answer I got to that was a line of hot kisses pressed down my spine, and then a good many more elsewhere. Perhaps it was the only possible response, to such a statement; I certainly would not have any words adequate myself. Odfrin never really _did _need words, though. There was – there _is – _a more subtle power at play with her; a way of looking, and touching, that bypasses language completely and sires understanding regardless. She had – has – no talent for my craft, as later trials proved with resounding finality, but perhaps that was merely due to an inability to wield consciously what she so easily utilizes by instinct. For I would be an idiot if I thought Odfrin unable to incite entanglement; the woman does it wherever she goes, without the slightest effort or realization, though it took me some time to recognize her subtle, unconscious weave-work. Looking back, that may actually have been what attracted me to her the most – or to put it another way: I, given my craft, was increasingly susceptible to her skill, and thus easily ensnared. … that's the correct word, but, gods, it doesn't sound like it. Ensnared. Yeesh; eliminate the negative connotations, and there you go: accurate. Regardless, though, of whether or not I was and am drawn to Odfrin because of her uncanny talent with the natural force central to my work, I am of the opinion that that talent is her defining trait. All her capacity to understand our dreams and desires, to embrace our faults, to draw us closer to one another; all of it is enabled by her ability to bind herself to another being, that easy intertwining of one life to another such that neither can be fully described without the other. All that she is stems from that; it is her defining characteristic. No wonder at all, then, that I named her Love.

And, ah, but the irony of _me _explaining understanding to _her. _I'm blushing, it's so ridiculous; she knows far more of understanding just by instinct than I ever will by study. If only she could apply it consciously, and bring her sweetness to me here, now, in this place – but, ah. No. That is pointless. And anyway no longer such an ache; things are better, now. There is Falif, is there not? That, I could never have expected, nor the comprehension crystal of some long dead Ayleidoon apprentice edaphomancer that his acquaintance brought me, either. And yes, yes, I have been wrapped in this memory now for far too long; off and back to work. But, ah: what else to expect, when my craft is bloomed so anew in my mind with this work, but that I should hark back to that day in our bed, when I tried to teach its mistress? That day when I shared so much, and learned so much more. My life here opens as though to the morning sun; my heart so much the same, in that bed. Burgeoning and blooming, it was, and all innocence of what would come after.

But enough of that. I have soil-secrets to delve.

Jon Urfe

in correspondence with

Jon Urfe


	20. Chapter 19

**Chapter XIX**

Indeed I have _not _forgotten Jon's unnerving somnolent idiosyncracies, nor have I neglected contemplation of their probable effect upon the ensnarer – and oh, but the word is most suitable – of his heart. As much as it may _seem _that I have overlooked this little nuance, such is not the case. If it has been overlooked at all, the doing was Jon's alone. But what surprise there? What surprise that a man should not write of his newest lover's strange immunity to the creeping coldness of his slumbering bones, itself a quirk of which he was entirely unaware? There should be no surprise; he could not have done it. Jon did not himself know what had driven away every lover save Odfrin so swiftly from his side; none of them had been particularly inclined to speak of it, as you may well imagine. So do not be surprised that our dear pompous-pimpled Ambassador has not provided you with a neat, tidy explanation of why his new Nord stayed snuggled sure and certain by his side through the night. Such a demand is purely ridiculous.

But in the interest of assuaging the uncertainties of any other, less bold, doubters amongst you: here, take this as your short form explanation. It was not that Odfrin was somehow immune to the alienating effect of Jon's stiff, soul-emptied slumber, but rather that that character of slumber did not exist. For from the first instant Jon slept in those round, milky arms he slept as any other man; flushed, warm, and flexible. Alive, and a solid, comforting, hairy strength for a woman's cheek to rest on in the night. Gone was the corpse-cold breasted terror; gone, and for as long as he stayed in that tangle-haired woman's mangled bed. Longer, in truth, for his sleep stayed natural and easy for weeks even after his departure, and would only return – only – returnlapsevert – when - - the – the – e – E – - _DAY_ - - -

A melting emerald's innards; tacky as sugar rich sap with the humid-huffing of the forest; suffused to supersaturation in mesophyll-filtered murk; oozing and fusing and candy-candle swamp frothing. The trees moss moist and warm as womer under my fingers, against my back; serpents sighing sultry in their hanging coitus coils overhead, draping languid jade vividity across broad branches, their spines slung in the curves of sweaty, dangling breasts; the trill of the lubo bird spinning slow in the distance. The single shaft of solid sunlight breaking the canopy, rearing around the fluttering hive-sleeve of home and shattering against its silken microplanes into short lived spirals and effervescent twirls, beaming the marble backbone into tawny, arch-spined effulgence; the stairs a carpet of light unrolled to the earthy forest floor's dim edge, prickled with silhouetted unstars; a crowd of blackly twinkling figures, arrayed across the blinding steps; the huddled wretch in their shadow.

And the two mer facing my home's grandest entrance and the household arrayed upon it; one huge, towering, overwhelmingly tall, callused golden hands dangling by his wide hips; the other – the other. My height. Smooth curves from crown to heel, like dolloping honey. Her hands – her nimble hands – _her broken nails hahahaha – _twining impatience in the small of her back. Both back in their own outlandish work wear; tawny and tight-fitted robes, straight-swept and speckled everywhere with pockets and buckles, their long, bare toes poking out from the hems atop the algae-slicked earth, both with their ten thousand tiny brown braids dangling and interwoven to their ankles, sheening luscious red in the fragmented sunlight. Our horses at their backs, manes dripping to the ground like the ichor of animunculi. _The land longed to leave me. _Thus did I take my leave from my land.

Tsirelsyn spread his broad hands, bowing. "It has been a delightful visit, !# $$!$," he said to my sun-robed father on the steps. "Your family has been so welcoming to us. It is a pain to depart so soon, I must say."

I could not see, given the brilliance, but I know my father smiled; he had befriended the enormous soil consultant very quickly. But then, so had everyone else _the fucking cunts. _"It certainly is," he answered. "I don't know that my table staff will be good for anything for a month, they've been so distraught at your going. Haven't you, now?"

A clamor like the waking of birds answered him, and the stairs fairly fluttered with flailing silhouetted arms. My father laughed over it all.

"Go on, then, go on!" he chuckled. "Say goodbye to your Son."

A gaggle of young – and not so young – girls tumbled eagerly down the steps and into the gloom of the jungle. They threw themselves enthusiastically at the huge, delightedly laughing soil-sorcerer, surrounding him in a massive many-armed hug, pressing kisses on him wherever they could reach. He gave each one a pat and a proper bent-kneed monkey's hug – some also took the opportunity for a proper kiss – and then shooed them on back up the steps. His daughter sidled back into position, shaking her gorgeous head at the retreating flood of womerly affection.

"Ah, Tsiri," my father chuckled, "you really must tell me your secret, some day."

"No secret," the big mer answered. "Just love."

"You apply it better than anyone I've ever met, though. It truly has been a joy to have you here, Tsiri. I didn't expect, when I wrote for a soil consultant, that I would instead get a friend I would miss for the rest of my life."

"There is no need to miss us," Tsirelsyn replied gently. "For you will always have us. We are not truly parted. There is always this moment."

My father choked out a chuckle, then stepped forward for his own dwarfing embrace against the huge mer's broad chest. He stepped back after a long moment, gripping soil-sorcerer's arm warmly.

"Be well, Son. Be well," he said, and patted the mer's arm.

"Speaking of sons," he went on, more briskly, "where's mine? It's not usually his way to be late to something like this."

I stirred, but Tsirelsyn's deep voice answered before I could say a word.

"He is here," he said, and raised one long hand to beckon toward me.

"I am here," I agreed quietly as I straightened up and stepped forward from my place in the shadows of the trees to the side of the entrance yard. I brought my fingers to the warm nose of the horse waiting dark and silent at my back, and - _AND HIS FIST IN MY HAIR BROKE MY BROW ON THE STEPS - _together we strode forward to the gathering's nexus; in terror, to the border of sun and shade where broken-minded madness huddled, fixated on my form; in bravery, to the soil-sorceress's side.

Father appraised me gravely, his narrow, night-wet black eyes glittering. "ReaDYYY - - then - ! – _profiles sliced from shadow hahahaHAhggghh that soft chin haha that slumped spine hurrrghh both broken I broke both and there's nothing they can ever – _my son?" he said at last, and held out one bronzed, alloy-callused hand.

I _– s – spit – scowlsneered – _bowed low over his palm, and pressed a kiss into the patina-crusted creases of his skin. "I am – AM – _WILL NOT – _AM – _I AM NOT_ I AM – ready, father."

He smiled fondly down, and raised me back to my full height with fingers chucked beneath my chin.

"I know you are. You are eager for it, I know, though separation clouds your ardor in this moment. And that is good; eagerness will fuel your study, and your practice, and your skill. But do not grow over-fond of Alinor, ! 3%1234. I expect him back within a century, you hear me, Tsiri?" His eyes jumped over my head.

"I hear you," the soil consultant answered wryly, smiling with one side of his wide, full-lipped mouth. "But I'm afraid that there's little I can do. The peril is inherent; there is no way to learn our craft except to be bound by it. If he has any talent at all – and I know that he does – he will become intertwined with our soil. That much is inevitable."

"Oh?" One sharp, shining eyebrow quirked. "Well. Well, and yet. And yet, what of this?" He bent suddenly, crouching low to the ground, his silken shroud fluttering and flashing a forge-glinting aura-outline. His strong fingers shoveled into the littered, moss-slick earth. Muscles trembled in my back, like a horse in horror. The hunched figure gave a gulping spasm in the shadow of the stairs; a flash like cast-off creatia, the glimmer of eyes like dead stars. Tendons clenched, and the hand of my father rose, dribbling crumbles of ochre soil like dead skin.

"My land, from my hands to yours," Father said, cupping the mossy mound in his palms before me. "Keep it near you, always, and do not forget that it is _this _land and no other to which you belong." His palms parted, and cool earth tumbled to my skin _– and mud up my nose across my teeth down m__y shirt –_

"I – I – yes, father." I moved to stow the soil in one of the sacks slung across my horse's sleek black spine. I turned toward the silent, stiff-gilt womer, but my hands, and the soil in them, swung opposite; to dirty, tangled golden twine hidden in shadow.

A huge hand caught my shoulder _– and I thought he would throttle me dead there on the steps but the paw of the dirt wizard – _gently before I had even completed my turn.

"Are you sure you don't want to come as well?" Tsirelsyn asked of my father with a creasing, twinkling smile. "You've learned much yourself of the nature of our craft in just this short time. For this little bit of soil will indeed do as you supposed, in instinct," he said, touching the back of my cupped palms with fingers that made mine seem a child's. "It will bind your son to this place, in heart and mind and soul. But weakly, weakly, and fading as the soil is sundered. We can do you better, though, if you wish it. If this is the course you would have us take."

"What do you mean?" Father asked. I could only blink up, silent, at the smile-lined face high above. The corners of my eyes crawled; in one a snapped spine and a tangle of lank, limp-sun-hopeful locks; in the other, amber sculpted lips and gaze of black and gold, still and closed and cold.

"We are edaphomancers," Tsirelsyn answered simply. "We can bind your son to this soil with undying security. I had not thought of such… it is not usually a matter of consideration. But we can do it, to seed a strong tie to this place in your son. If he agrees?" He put the question gently, peering down at me with his soft, chromatically cloven eyes. "It is not normally done to intertwine an apprentice with the soil of his homeland any more than exists already, but if you think it would give you comfort, away from your home, or that it would give your father comfort in the assurity that you would return, then I see – see – see – see no reason why we cannot do so for you. We can make you this soil's unto eternity, if you wish."

I hesitated. I could not think. My eyes were crowded with profile and profile; the heat hung heavy on my tongue, like a sick dog in summer. There was too much, too much pulsing beneath my skin, too much throbbing in the supersaturated scene_sssssss_.

"What would be the effect?"

The soil-sorcerer's shoulders shrugged. "A consciousness. A connection between you and this land. Never overt, never overwhelming, never ceasing. You will simply sense that you are this land's, and this land is yours. A difficult thing to take on just before your departure, but the reunion will be sweeter than you can imagine. And it will preclude any _immobilizing _entanglements, at least, with the soil of Alinor." He paused, appraising my eyes carefully. 'Would you like to proceed?"

"Think of it, son," Father said quietly. "Never to be truly parted from your home. To always have that comfort in the back of your mind. Think of it." His hand came up to the back of my neck, gritty and wet with the earth he offered – _and he slammed his hand hard against my neck and my knees hit the ground but I spit in his face anyway and he yelled like a tiger. His face was right by mine and blood-blister red and twisted like taut twine and I couldn't even tell what he was – _

"Yes. Yes, very well, Father."

"Excellent!" He beamed at me, sharp teeth shining in the sun, broad cheeks folding into taut, sharp-edged crinkles. "Tsiri?"

"Are you sure?" the huge mer asked gently, dichromic eyes probing with careful concern. No doubt but that that preternatural perception of his had noted the tic in my eye, the quaver in my fingers, the forge-gleam on my brow. It was not the anxiety of the offer, but of the leaving itself, and of the cowardice in it, and of the irresistibility of it, and of the _– very good times I had __with those two even if it is all at an end. _His voice lowered. "What is wrong, young one? There is a tension in you. There is nothing to fear in the soil. It is warmth, and comfort incarnate; the return to absolute trust and dependence. You have never known an intimacy to compare, save in the womb. It is not to be feared. Will you accept it?"

There was no thought in me. There was no reason. But something – something moved my tongue – my tongue – _MY TONGUE! ground into the dirt and he shouted Eat it! Eat it! Eat it, you shame! You filth! You disgrace of my loins! and I struggled but my hands were tied behind my back and he always was stronger than me from ox wrangling and just kept pounding my face into the dirt again and again and the grit he had stuffed into my mouth was sour and metallic and grated against the back of my throat and across my gums. You piece of shit, he said, you disgusting little cretin! Choke! and wrenched tighter on my hair. Choke on it! he said Choke and die! but I only laughed, and then a coiled cord of silk from his own sleeve was around my throat and I really was choking, and all I could see was red bathed horizon and shifting feet white and gold in terror but I laughed, I laughed, I laughed as I choked on silk and soil. And then a jerk and a release, and I fell flat to the ground coughing out choke-chuckles and the dirt idiot was saying Enough ! 3236%4! This is not the way – _and I spoke.

"Yes."

His eyes till searched mine, not convinced. The pressure of his hands eased momentarily, as though he would withdraw, refuse, and the moment quavered like a plucked string; my eyes dilated wide with a sharp ache. Stilled, and his brow clenched, but the mouth moved on. Vibration shivered up his throat; time twanged past his teeth.

"Very well. It shall be done, then. And in its doing, we – we - - _his rough fingers on my chin, and I spat in his ugly face too. But he just blinked and talked like he didn't have saliva drying on his cheeks like I hadn't – He said, You have done grave ill to my daughter. Graver than you could ever know. My stomach roils with abhorrence for your profanity, and my father's fist longs to crush you into the powder it so could so easily render your bones. To stop your own father's humiliations sends my heart ashudder with shame, though I know in my mind that I must. That is the reaction of instinct. That is the reaction __you_ _would understand. But I will not follow it. Because for all that it seems that you are nothing but a vile, willful villain, a degenerate disgrace upon your race by your own choice and revelation, I know that this is but an illusion. I know it, though I cannot now feel it. What you have done, you have done from necessity, not from freedom. And I recognize that you and I are not so different. Though my heart screams out that you are no kin to my spirit, I know that there is that in me which covers the unwilling flesh of womer, just as in you there is a seed of accepting gentleness. How, then, could I condemn you? I understand you. I am you. I love you. I love you, though I cannot now touch it._

_ I laughed in the enormous weakling's face, and coughed mud on his wrist. P-pussy, I choked out, and laughed till my ribs hurt even more than their breaking had. Let me kill him, Son Father growled as he grabbed my hair again, He is worthless. He is nothing! Let me kill him, and at least obtain the vengeance of pride. No, the dirt magician answered, and knocked father's serrated shard away from my throat. I cannot allow that he said To harm in return to harm is only to feed the cycle of sundering. We must respond with love, not with hate. There is that within your son that it is still beautiful. There is hope for him, if we but try. He looked at me directly then, eyes, to eyes, just inches apart, and black-gold blazed to black and gold and I stopped laughing. He said Your mother died in your birth, didn't she? And I said How did you know that? And he said It is written on the bone of your heart. You have never been shown the path to memory. Sundering is your sole association with your mother and the Mother, the vector of the horizon, love. I understand. My mother, too, died with my birth. But you need not fear any longer. There is comfort. There is a golden dream. There is memory's omnipresence. She has not abandoned you completely. __There is ambericity.__ I will show you. I will bind you to the womb of myth. I will show you love in a handful of earth. And – and his fingers – _his fingers –

His fingers plucked up a piece of ochre earth from the crumbled clod in my palms – _swabbed amber mud from my tongue – _cupped my jaw gently; eased open my mouth and laid the segment of soil on my trembling tongue. _Then slash and dash mud-marks across my cheeks and forehead and I couldn't move as though every muscle had been bound – _dragged a moss-moist thumb-palleted dab across my face; blew on my eyes, and touched soil to their lids. Another flash of pain as dilation flickers flexed in my eyes – _and his voice There is only one way to show you. You see most that closest to your eye. AND THEN! Then! Those huge fingers! Patterned in soil-scrawls! Etched in earth! Those huge fingers, pressing down! Pressing down! down! down! rubbing dirt deep into my eye! and I screamed! I screamed as a blink made me blind! – _and he pressed my palms forcefully together, rubbing the grit and gunk of the earth into the smoothness of my skin. Then he stepped back in the jungle gloom, and turned toward the line of figures arrayed in the shaft of sunlight anointing the blazing marble steps. I could not stop blinking, my eyelids tingling with wet clay – _the pain! the pain! colloids crunching, smashed by flesh to flesh! – _and with each flicker, the flare of figure to either side; gloom and gold, glassy and peach-rush luscious; shuddering and silent.

"I told you that we cannot do much for your soil without a dedicated edaphomancer in permanent position," Tsirelsyn said, bowing his head briefly to my father's shining form, "and that is true. And yet – we can do some. We can ameliorate your troubles temporarily. You have given me your son, to train; to become the eventual edaphomancer of this land." _I have taken your son from your hands, which would dispel him. I bind him now to Nirn's nourishment, to the actualization of ambericity, that he might learn love. I seat understanding in his sight. _"And so as I bind him anew to this earth which has birthed him – a proto-consecration of his dedication – I too tangle your unraveling earth." _I entwine this slayer of soil with soil itself, and heal it thereby. An embrace is the only true victory. _

"_Cehseekye."_

And the daughter stirred at my side.

_"Father._"

_The dirt magician watched his precious little girl come closer with eyes dripping that overtly sorrowful look fathers of well-tasted womer always have that only pretends at sadness but is really just a disguise for jealousy that they are too cowardly to do the same and I smiled again in spite of the eye he had blinded._

She stopped before him, soft-featured face blank, black and gold gaze staring, wide mouth flat and hard despite her lush lips. Her father's voice lowered.

_Can you do this my… daughter? _"Ready now, Cehs?"

Silence. Those eyes. That mask-perfect mouth. Those eyes. _That body, oh hahahahaha, that bruise-tenderized body. And she said You want me to embrace evil and haha, that rich voice scraped to rawness, and Yes said the Son._

Her chin rose. _Her mouth twisted. As the Son wills for his daughter, so shall it be. I am given to degradation. _"I am."

"Then let us begin." _I am so sorry, mother._

And she was before me. Completely paralyzing, overwhelming in her simple existence, and the other dwindled to a buzzing gnat under the power of her eyes, her mouth, her hair, her neck, her _shoulders, _those lush, flushed _shoulders. _She stared directly at me, and those black and gold eyes swallowed my soul in the obsession of emptiness; there was nothing in the world save her gaze's gravity, its golden grasp, its well-black brink, its severed observation _–__ silent-screaming in the night-wight's hell-hole I pounded her soul into with my – _and then she was stepping forward, and her eyes were so close to mine, perfectly level, and her lips were right _there. _I could not breathe. I could not breathe, until she stepped around me, and then I could gasp in the dry, herb-musted perfume of her flesh. She swung close behind me, and pressed her soft body close against my back, laid her arms, her amber arms, her peach-downed arms along mine and raised my bony wrists with her fingers; horizontal before me, palms up. And she laid her tiny hands curled up in mine.

Her father came forward, looming, shading, the sun splintered on his net-woven braids. He knelt, a massive hunch like a beast in the trees, and his knees hit the wet earth at the edge of the jungles' gleam and our day-sheath's shine, draped in the red-gold chatoyancy of his hair; forehead pressed to the soil at my feet as his daughter's breasts pressed against my back _–__ her claws clamped on my cheeks and I struggled, my spitting bloody, muddy defiance and it hurt so much but nothing to when – _His head rose. His eyes met mine. His hands – those huge golden paws – floated up like dreams, and wrapped closeness around mine, around his daughter's, _around mine and his daughter's. _And she spoke behind me, puffed musk soil-air into my hair just as his mouth moved below; a syllable of swallowed sound rolling over and over upon itself in their throats, humming against my head, throbbing through my feet. The moment's supersaturation _ripened. _Ripened, and _raveled; _for the mer's braids reared and wriggled as one; up, to twine about his thick golden forearms and around his daughter's wrists and about my biceps; down, and frizz-web winding through the ochre soil; as his daughter's teeth ratcheted around my first vertebrae, a mother's cub-dangling prerogative, and her live-licks sealed a snaking skein-coccoon round my head, my trembling throat, sealing us together,_ together, _pressed in her darkness, snugged in her webbed warmth. Her hot mouth sent tremors crawling across my skin like ripples over water, like the creeping trail of her hair tying around my shoulders, my chest, down to mingle with her father's – _and their hair, their hair, their hair came for me! Lancing strands! Supple needles! Sifting through my skin and toward the dirt, the grit, the grime they had shoved in my mouth! and in my eye! my eye! my eye! Centrex of soil, my eye! – _and womb-warm, soft, smooth, dark, with _her _pressed against me, around me, tight, inseparable, vast, and my muscles trembled with a flesh-memory expressible only by hue, only by the amber rub of the crumble-twined earth expanding below me, above me, through me, and ensnaring my limbs with snake-strangling strength and I could not want to, could not wish to break those bonds, for they tied me in ALL! ALL was around me! ALL was close! ALL was intimate! All was wound through the soil's webbed weave piercing ALL that I was, and there was no fear! No loneliness! No sorrow, only – _the chains! The chains, everywhere!_ _All of me bound! ALL of me snared! All of me snugged inside all of you! You! You! TERROR! I SAW! I SAW I bound in WE bound in ME__,__ and my own self the chains! The chains, sewn with me forever! My fingers! My skin! My tongue! My heart! My bones! My veins! My member! My eye! My eye! MY EYYYYYYEEEEEEEE - - - - - _

And then – the sundering. Soil shroud shredded like rotten fabric, its strand-snares snapping, tearing, ripping deep in my skull, the earth tangle sucking sharply loose, and my remaining eye seared in shafting sun, and I cried like a newborn babe on my family's marble stairs. I cried at the coldness of it, the aloneness, the insurmountable separation, the mocking memory of the earth's grip throbbing in my veins with the imperceptible shivers of the echo-shivers of the land I had never before truly known, the raw wound-wetness of my new-bared skin in the sun, in the empty air. I cried with the ache of the vacant socket in my skull, selfsame as the absence of soil. I cried with the slice of the shard in my fist. I flailed, and cringed on my back across the stairs, the horrified faces of my father and family towering around me in shocked dismay, but I didn't care; the only thought in me was of the renewed wound. That, and _her. _I cried at the thought of _her; _so close, so warm, so soft, so perfect, so impossible to approach; fate-bound separate by her own edaphomancy.

A shape blocked the sun; Tsirelsyn, and I sobbed as his hair curtained us together in awful mimicry. My fingers clutched his neck convulsively.

"You are wrong," he said, and there were tears in his heterochromic eyes. "To remember is not to mock. Memory is a gift, and that only which can bring intimacy's return. Never forget that. Never forget that. _Intimacy can be reclaimed. Intimacy _will _be reclaimed. And you are now part of the effort; bound, in all times possible and impossible."_ He searched my near catatonic gaze, his own shining with silt like stars and almost frantic; disconnectedly disconcerting, from that eternally imperturbable face. His fingers fumbled, and something smooth, hard, and sharp slipped into my hand; back into my hand, for it had fallen in my flailing. I gripped it convulsively, as though magnetized. Then he pressed his lips to mine, and pulled back, his huge hands under my neck and spine, lifting me up into an unsteady, huddled lean against his side. The sun seared past my squint; I could see only the black unstar shining flicker of my father's silhouette.

"It is done." Tsirelsyn's voice rumbled in the firm flesh pressed against my head.

"What have you done?" Father was too shocked to be furious.

'What you have requested. What your son agreed to. What my heart forbore, and then called for regardless. We have shown your son the soil that is his, in the only way that could be done; by placing it before his eye. Not clean. Not easy. Frayed, and snarled, and tangled, and terrible. And wonderful. It is the point of the thing. So much, so fast – we do not do such to all for a reason, ! #4%1!. And in honesty I do not know why I agreed to do such today. My heart forbore it, and yet its necessity could not be denied. I would be more clear, my friend, if I could."

"But – Son! – my _son!" _

"He will be well," the mer rumbled. "He is merely assimilating the capacity for memory – and, consequently, for sorrow – that so many in this land have surrendered. He will be well."

'But – his _eye!" _My fingers clenched. My empty eyelid fluttered, reflex bewildered.

"Is similarly well," Tsirelsyn answered. "And will guide him yet. It is not gone, but rather bound to this land and its people, that he might always see the soul of your soil. _That he might never be free from love._" His hand rubbed my arm comfortingly, and I nearly collapsed closer against him. But I did not; my spine stiffened, and I straightened up on my own, blinking my single fleshly eye.

"I am fine, father," I said, and with surprising firmness given the ache in my soul. The sun-sodden faces peered alarmedly in on me, fragrance veils aflutter in alarm. "Truly."

"Are you certain, son?" Father said tentatively. "You do not look well. Your eye – your departure could be postponed a few days, if –"

"No," I said sharply, slashing a line through the air with my clenched fist, the fist imprinting around a newborn shard of stone. "No, we will leave now." The thought of abandoning that place, my home, my soil, made my eye-socket sear, but to linger on would be a worse agony. Tsirelsyn touched my shoulder in understanding.

"I am certain, father," I preempted as the metal-weathered mer opened his mouth to question again. "We will leave now."

"It is best," Tsirelsyn agreed. "Your son has begun his training with us already, this day. To delay would only exacerbate his trials. Better to go. _He must go with us, now. We will teach him the beauty of his bonds._

_ Take him Father said, and his voice rang sneer-sodden in my echoing ears, though I cannot fathom the depth of your motivation in harboring such a man-muscled disgrace as what I once called my son has become. I would have him slain like the mannish beast he is. Take him, and bind him, but never bring him back._

"He will return to you," Tsirelsyn said. "That is the promise he has sewn into himself this day. _But such must be done. Here are his bonds; the soil web. His eye is in the earth, and will be in the earth. We will return him to you when it has opened. _Do not fear."

His hand pressed my shoulder. I twitched a smile to Father's frowning uncertainty, the bronze-browed ring-crowd's stark, sun-boiled stares, and turned on the steps. The jungle's cathedral vault loomed gloom-green before me; the frond-filtered canopy, white-ribbed sycamore ceiling sultry serpent slung; the plantation platform arms stretching marble-mellow beneath the leaves; our mares, vibrant as void, manes oozing head to hock like oil fall fountains, stamping split-clawed hoof-prints in the duff; and _her. _Cehs. Cehseekye. The daughter. The Mother. Already mounted and ease-seated sideback in her tawny poly-pocketed robes, hair back in its sleek net-weave and cloaking her smooth shoulders, eyes still the same, despite what we had shared; still split, still sealed, still shielded, still separate. I froze, a moment, my hands trembling, my eye quavering, my lungs seizing at the sight. Then a shadow moved by the stairs, and my head turned; turned, and there was she, the other, broken, bent, shaking, huddled against the stairs; there was her fierce-frizz congealed to lank-lackluster round her crumpled face in oily, bronze clog-braids; there were the hands that had fed me, eased me, stroked me, gone from nimble to nervous, twitching, and spastic; there was the throat, there were the shoulders, there were the breasts I had felt on my mouth, my tongue, lush-lovely to slack-hollow; and there were her eyes, the eyes that had winked at me in the dark like stars, the eyes that stared up at me with just as much emptiness, just as much distance, just as much sundered sorrow as those of the elf, even her incredible capacity for sequestration overcome, her sole inflexibility exploited, the eyes that had spilled warmth and comfort with every starry flash, and seen me down and down for who I was and what I could never be; effervescent luminescence to spine-shattered harrow. I met those eyes. I held them, with my one. I swelled with a sympathy for their sorrow of a depth that I could never have imagined before that day; an aching, heartrending supersaturated co-sorrow for all that she had gone through because of me. The soil itself sobbed with it. Then I walked on, and I mounted my bareback black horse, and I rode away from the soil twined round my soul, from my father, and from the woman whose arms had held such unexpected love. I rode away from land and love I had known toward that which I never could. I followed the soil-sorcerer's daughter, and I followed by will – _coercion because they tied my hands to my ankles under the horse's hot belly with the chains they had strung through my muscles and I kicked and screamed and struggled against the pain and the chains and the terror of the memory of so much so close so intrusive so overpowering so subsuming for as long as I could. And I couldn't do it at first but after a while I laughed too because whatever they did they couldn't erase me or the fact that I pounded that earth magician's dirty little daughter into the ground just as hard as I ever pounded that fat piece of yellow-headed man pussy and she'll never, never, _never _forget that moment no matter how many times go by, never forget me in – in - - _! - ! ! - ! !

- and thusly did the incompleteness of Odfrin's power, perhaps merely virtue of her mannish blood, or perhaps learned long ago, by the dilution of Jon's capacity for understanding implied in their entanglement, shield the man from his cold-fleshed void-nights and keep him bound by her side.


	21. Chapter 20

**Chapter XX**

This is quite possibly the most frustrating transynthesis of comprehension that I have ever undertaken. I mean, memospores always try to sink mycelia into one's mind and the Dwemeri resonance rods always make my teeth feel like they'll be vaporized at any moment (it actually _has _happened, I've heard, in semi-rare cases) but at least their comprehension context doesn't actually _change _as you go along. And I'm convinced that that is what is happening here; the crystal's catalyst nodes are actually behaving differently every time I link up for an observation. Of course the act of observation alters the root of meaning even for the instigator – that is the nature of understanding, as I explained to Odfrin once – but that should _not _change the nature of the catalyst itself. It is, though; that's the only explanation I can find for the phenomenon. Still no idea why, too.

So slow progress. I just can't get much done in a reading if I'm jostled and jangled the whole time through like that. Progress, though. But that's frustrating too; only the most basic of the soil-sorcerer's secrets, thus far. To be expected, I suppose, given that it was an apprentice doing the etching, and still – surprisingly – intriguing, but no less frustrating. To have worked nearly a week and a half and only have extracted a brief enumeration of a soil-sorcerer's duties and an admittedly incomplete definition of soil is – well, frustrating.

But yes, intriguing. If the edaphomancers are correct – and for the purposes of investigation, it is best to assume that they are – then there is far more complexity to the soil than I could ever have expected. Soils, I should say, and that is part of the topic's intricacy: no two plots of land have exactly the same soil. But underlying _that _complexity is the conjunction of complication that is _any _soil. Even the term itself is a nightmare to define, as I have found in consideration of the matter sparked by most recent transyntheses. What _is _a soil, really? It's a question most of us have never even asked ourselves, despite the fact that we all live our lives dependent upon soil resources. Soils underlie our every action, and yet most of us could not even define what they are – or if we could, we would encompass only the smallest fraction of the reality. My own preliminary definition – that soils are simple mineral masses covering the surface of Nirn, which provide structural support for and act as nutrient reservoirs to plants – was quickly proven shortsighted and incomplete by further crystalline inquiry. However, I found the definition presented by this long-gone edaphomancer's apprentice to be just as unsatisfactory as he would have found mine; indefinite and noninformative.

I think it has to be that way, though. Defining soils, generally – to do it in one sentence, one must be indefinite. Because soils are not like most things, not concrete and obvious and easily contained. And if you consider what the edaphomancers are saying here, it really makes sense; soils cannot be defined so easily as other things because soils are not so much _things _as _interactions _of things. They're not _just _minerals, like I though, or even just mixtures of minerals with water and air and plants and other creatures. Soils contain all of those things, yes, but just having them all piled together in one place does not a soil make. They have to interact with each other, depend on each other, combine with each other. It is the entanglement of components that edaphomancers call soil; the interface between macroscopic elementia, between earth, water, air, light, flesh, and thought. That is how edaphomancy defines soil; as the entanglement of elements. Well: or rather, how it _begins _to define soil, for my apprentice instructor openly acknowledges that a deeper definition awaits him further along in his study. And I do hope that he is correct, because this definition, as revolutionary as it is, tells me so very little about what actually goes on in soils.

And it _is _revolutionary, this definition. It is an incredibly drastic shift from convention human conception – primarily because it forces us to consider that there could be so much more in soils than we might have thought. I thought – when I actively thought about soils, which has only been since I came to Alinor – that soils were merely composed of minerals, but edaphomancy claims to have found much, much more than just that. Soils, according to edaphomancy, while indeed founded upon particles of variously sized non-living material – stone, glass, shell, crystal – contain also a plethora of other components of equal or greater importance. Soils have their own aquatic environments, in the films of water bound around their particles, as they have their own atmospheres in the spaces between those particles. Soils contain organic as well as inorganic material; the mineral foundation is only held together in the irregular matrix of proper tilth by the linking and crosslinking capabilities of the decomposed vegetation, fecal matter, and moldering flesh (all together known as humus) that pervades all healthy soils. And if there is dead organic matter within soils, it is only logical to assume that there is living as well. And indeed this is true; edaphomancy has shown that soils serve as habitats for an incredibly diverse range of life forms, from minutiae such as the oozes, slimes, mucks, mildews, molds, rusts, algaes, yeasts, nematodes, amoebas, ciliates, and rotifers to the midsized mites, springtails, and enchytraids to the macroscopic mollusks, mosses, earthworms, ants, termites, beetles, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, woodlice, mice, moles, voles, badgers, snakes, grasses, ferns, shrubs, trees, and other plants, animals, and insects in staggering variety. All of that life is in soils – and all of that life is _of _soils. That is one of the key frustrations of edaphomancy's preliminary definition; it leaves out this most key point, forcing my tutor and I to stumble in on the revelation later on our own. For the entanglement of soils as defined by edaphomancy has a very important logical consequence. By definition, entanglement implies that a party cannot be sufficiently described without reference to its entwined partner. Consider what that means for soils then, Jon: each component is individually insufficient to describe the soil as a whole, and is itself undefined without reference to the rest; not only to the entirety of the system, but to _each component individually. _Now, I'm no vivisectionist, but I've talked to a fair few and listened to my share of lectures on the nature of life in this world, and it has been quite well established in my mind that the only really robust criterion for life is the combined intra- and inter- dependence of parts. And by that definition – well, soils are live. So claims edaphomancy. Soils are organisms, of themselves. Soils are alive.

It strikes me as a special sort of life, though. I mean, considering how we treat animals and plants; if an animal eats another animal or a plant consumes some nutrient in its environment, we say that one has ceased and become a mere part of the other. In contrast, we do not say such if one organism simply lives within another. We do not say that it then becomes a mere subsection of the larger; it maintains its own identity. With soils, though, it is different. Soils are the interfaces of existence's elements; they are _composed of _minerals, humus, plants, animals, air, light, thought, etc., but viewed individually these parts are not soil in and of themselves. In contrast to our views toward plants and animals, when an organism exists within a soil it becomes _part of _that soil, by virtue of interface with it – and yet also maintains its own identity. Compare to organs, perhaps: organs do not _really _have their own identities, separate from the organism to which they contribute. The animals and plants and fungi existing within soils could be viewed as the soils' organs – but they have their own identities, in addition to those roles. Thus, it is a special sort of life that soils possess; a sort perhaps unique in all the worlds. A sort in which the creation of a larger identity does not necessitate the deletion of smaller, and the creation of smaller does not necessitate the dissolution of larger. Soils do not subsume the individualities of their parts. And I think that is very special indeed. And very intriguing.

But not as intriguing as the other implications present in the declaration of the vivacity and entanglement of soils. Not nearly. Discipline, your chafe is nearly ended. I have done my duty and recorded my thoughts on the apprentice's words in due logical course, as will be proper for later evaluation and adaptation to report, but _now, _now is the release. Now I can throw my mind into the most fascinating aspects of this edaphomancy. Ooh. Ooh. Let's go.

I have covered earth, air, water, and flesh thus far in my summary of edaphomancy's definition and extrapolation. I have left light and thought to the last apurpose – for the entanglements of these elements have the most import to my research. Further implication of the concept of soils as living organism: for if soils possess flesh, organs, and all the other elements of life, might they not also possess the higher functions of living organisms? Might they not also possess minds and spirits? Might they not _think and feel_, albeit in a manner as different and special from what we would normally see as the soil life model is from the standard? And, indeed, if soil _does _incorporate both light and thought/spirit – which, again, for the purposes of investigation, at least, I must accept edaphomancy's claims and assume that it does – it only makes sense that this should be true; if the substrate is present, and the body is alive, it is logical to assume that the substrate assumes its characteristic living patterns. It only makes sense, then, that soils should be conscious. 'How' is of course always the question of consequence; so now a closer look at this aspect of edaphomancy.

There are two primary constructs present in soils that account for the entanglement of magic and spirit therein, and thus for the consequent phenomenon of soil consciousness. The first is a type of quasi-morpholithic microcrystalline colloidal matrix which forms over time as a result of natural, magical, and mythical processes. These matrices are found to some degree in all soils of sufficjent age, but are more prominent in soils that developed from glassy, or especially crystalline, parent materials, as opposed to rocky or stony parent materials such as granite or basalt. The second construct that contributes to the phenomenon of soil consciousness is what edaphomancy calls an 'amorphous dislocalized conmotivated affinity snare.' Which means, as far as I can tell, that soils contain modified forms of the organic constructs which seize and hold the souls of men, mer, and beast within our fleshly bodies. I don't understand how _that _works, though, as our vivisectionists have thus far pinpointed nothing of the sort and as my apprentice tutor does not see fit to elaborate further, I think that for now I will simply have to accept on faith that edaphomancy is correct.

The presence of these constructs within soils allows them to act as a sort of sponge for both magicka and thought-forms, as reservoirs or banks of aetherial and ideoplasmic material. They are well established facts: both that Nirn's vegetation is incapable of absorbing the entire spectrum of aetheria which reaches our skies – only a small portion of the magicka present in light can be harvested for physiological activity - and that internal ideoplasmic comprehension catalysts seep steadily from the minds of all conscious organisms, high and low, save when the mind is extremely heavily shielded. The fate of the unutilized segment of the magickal spectrum and the fate of our shed ideoplasmic vesicles both have been questions open to debate and rampant speculation for many, many centuries – and have been, it seems, questions that Alinor has had answered for millennia. The soil, in short. The aetherial material not utilized by plants reaches the surfaces of soils, penetrates into the soil profile, and is adsorbed therein by this quasi-morpholithic colloid matrix. These colloids store that magickal energy over long periods of time – in equilibrium with their environments, of course; that energy isn't just sitting there. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of species of minutiae and macro –fauna and –flora which have seized upon the opportunity that aetherial presence presents and have found ways to absorb and utilize that energy to their advantage. Aetheria in the soil exists in a state of constant flux; binding and releasing from morpholithic colloids, flowing through the soul-snares of nematodes and molds and trees and whatever else can use it to advantage and discharging back into the soil matrix upon pattern application, mutating and morphing with the pressures of life. The result is a field of ambient magicka that permeates the soil profile, tied up in utilization cycles and equilibrium associations and constantly in action. In addition to direct light impact, soils also acquire magicka from the detritus of spent spells and the exudations of plant roots.

Edaphomancy claims much the same model for psychospiritual material: that the existence of this 'amorphous dislocalized conmotivated affinity snare' within soils necessarily means that the most basic vehicle of comprehension – the ideoplasmic reticulum, the secretory compiler of thought-stuff into the forms we use to communicate within ourselves – does not go unnoticed by the ground beneath our feet. The seepage of patterned ideoplasmic material from our minds – interestingly enough, similar to the purposeful metabolite seepage of plant roots that establishes rhizospheric regions in the soil – drifts down to the soils upon which we walk and is therein trapped in this amorphous snare's web-work. And much the same as soil-bound magicka, this ideoplasmic material is utilized by the soils' inhabitants. It cycles through the soils' components, mutating and recombining as it goes. The soil exchanges comprehension catalysts between its parts: and if that isn't thought, I'm not a comprehension specialist. This is, naturally, one way in which the soil maintains its interface entanglement: communication.

But here's the really interesting bit: soils do not have unlimited capacity for absorption. Soils inevitably become saturated with aetheria and ideoplasm – and when they do, they stop merely absorbing and transforming these materials and start _releasing _them. The import of that cannot be overstated. I mean to say, Jon, _think_ about it. Soils release patterned magicka and comprehension catalysts. _Soils both ensorcell and speak. _Soils cast spells. Soils sigh their thoughts. And not just regurgitations of those patterns that they have absorbed; oh no, oh no, those patterns decay almost immediately upon absorption. Ideoplasm and aetheria don't just sit still in soils; they get used, mutated, shifted, recombined, transformed, and when released may not resemble in the slightest any pattern the world has ever seen. And those patterns, when released – well, of course they're not without consequence. The magical exudations of soils have their subtle results on the world above, just as do any other spells. The exuded idea aerosol of soils finds its way into the minds of those living upon them, just as any other communication catalyst. Soils bespell existence; soils establish the comprehensive context; soils set the stage for societies.

A hard tonic to stomach, really. Not exactly something any of us would like to hear, I think, that our Empire's success may be due only to some constant, subtle soil-enchantment upon its people, or that the incredible innovations of our inventors were not independently derived but rather received as inspiration in the form of ideoplasmic soil exudates. We all like to think that _we_, the men and mer and beasts of the Empire, are responsible for that society's success, when in fact it may easily be that we are to some extent merely tools and receptors for the enchantments and inspirations rising from the subtle living bodies beneath our fields, feet, and fame.

Such a systemic phenomenon as this cannot be but fascinating for one in my field. To think that all of civilization from Aldmer to Alessia and on, has existed in the mental and magical context of Nirn herself, not just in its own intermingling of culture and convention and imagination, is purely astounding. If true, it means that all of my work up to this point has been almost as nothing, for I have omitted attention to the most pervasive of communicatory entanglements; that between society, each individual, and the world's sustaining skin. A constant twofold siphoning of patterned ideoplasm, from mind to soil to mind anew, and changed. It is catalytic communication, just the same as any book or song – and, oh, but the extension of that: just as any book or song or word links independently its co-entangled entities, creator to perceiver, so too must communication with the soil entangle both mortal to mortal and mortal to Nirn. A novel thought: all of us, to some degree or another, are intertwined with the soil upon which we live. Neither it nor we can be fully described without attention to the other. And gods, but that would render my work so bloody obtuse and ridiculously incomplete. I have looked only at comprehensive entanglements between sentient, 'civilized' beings, tracking their effects across distance, dimension, and temporality, but if that is only a small part of the whole, if soil-sorcerous entwinement is in fact the predominant exemplification of my art… then I have so much work to do. There are so many possibilities. I mean, considering that if the edaphomancers are correct then _everyone and everything_, alive or unalive, dead or undead, _ever _are linked to the soil, then all my individual entanglements are piddly little nonsensical jokes; _everything _is linked to _everything _else at all times and all points!

… well, and not quite. That would be true if all soils were the same, but I must remember that they are not. So, then, all organisms that exist within or upon a given soil are entangled with each other, for sure, not necessarily entangled with the ecosystems of other soils; not necessarily entangled with everything. Still, the implications spiral out to all fields of academia and arcana! Phaw to the chronographers with their lepidopteran soul snares; if the soil is bound to me in the now and I am bound to an author in the then and the author is bound to the soil in the then, the soil of the now is bound to the soil of the then; multiply that by the exponential factor of entanglements and individuals and what do you get? You get soils as the seat of tangled time, is what you get, and chew on that flutter-faces. Temporal fractures? Phaw! If edaphomancy is to be believed, non-linear causality at an imperceptible level is pervasive and unceasing. The historian's craft as it stands is now obsolete; adapt or die, dear commentators.

And what of application? To what use could I put an organism so interlinked to so many different - ! ! !

Well Mara's milk. So that's how they did it. I searched so long for an efficient transduction matrix, and here the elves have been using one they do not even have to manufacture. Soils. _That's _how they interlink their strand interaces; soils, with their reservoirs of interconnected ideoplasm and aetheria. _That's _how they're affecting such powerful long distance interconnectivity. Well, or so it seems to me, if what I have produced from the Ayleidoon edaphomancer's etchings and my subsequent conjectures are at all accurate. Intriguing; the idea that the entirety of the city-isle's soil hums with the thought-tangles of its people, that they have gone so far as to incorporate the natural mental capacity of the soil into a sort of supraconsciousness for their people, a mind differentiably accessible by each individual; that they have incorporated their soils as members of their society. Perhaps that is why direct traffic is so forbidden; no one wants to think about people out in the island somewhere walking on their very thoughts.

But a step back: for I do not have any proof for such postulation, and not _really _any proof that this strand library of the elves does work the way I think it does; i.e., that it simply catalyzes entanglements between individuals at distances and a degree of interdependence usually impossible. I _hope _that is what it is, for study of such would benefit my research immensely. My dynamistograph and spectra-sphere system is functional, but limited; it requires pre-existing entanglements between spheres, as well as significant user ability with the underlying force, even for a simple etching, while this soil-bound strand library, _because _of the soil, seems capable of spontaneous interconnection between any entities, not just the skilled. So it _seems, _but I must remember that I don't really _know. _Not that you can ever really know, but the phrase does persist despite the consciousness. I haven't even interacted with the thing myself, and I've only ever seen it used but once, when Odfrin took me out to the interface her old colleague stumbled across who knows how long ago.

A good day, that one. Just Odfrin and I, out on the streets of Alinor-urban, winding our way through the city's spiral spaces, across its inverted bridges and through its covered crossways, surrounded by cold crystal and rigid metal. The place is nearly blinding by day, with its prisma-shed chrome skin, so it was mostly the covered ways that we took, the hexagonal alleys and steep stairwells piercing the spiral spires. There are a thousand and eight ways to reach anywhere, in the Skeining City, so no struggle to find one out of the shattered sunlight. Odfrin led, of course, as she had a far better sense for the manifold intricacy of the City than I, and, omitting from consciousness all the elves we passed on their schedule skewed treks through twisted streets (which of course we did, as wrapped up in each other as we were) – we had a very pleasant walk. The company of Love will make even the most distancing of environments bearable.

It was some time before we could find the proper place, as I recall. Odfrin had never been there herself, and had only a dim idea of where her colleague had located his strand interface; she had to rely on the instincts born of long association with the city to pick out a path that resonated with what she sough (note: it seems to be a subconscious guess-and-check entanglement protocol, temporarily co-depending with pre-existing associations until the desired object is keyed. Never managed to get it myself – I've too much conscious practice with the craft to take up easily something so instinctual – but I think it's highly possible that Falif uses the same method to navigate the solum, so I definitely need to put some effort into its mastery). Tedious, but really all enjoyable, given the company, and we did eventually locate the correct site, tucked away at the bottom of a globe-faceted bastion scaled in sideways staircases, accessible only from a narrow, etched ramp spiraling down the chamber's wall.

A well of glassy blue-black stone, the interface's chamber; a perfect cylinder three hundred feet high and fifty across, stiff with the light of an arachnid's eye-array of enchanted spot-lamps set in the flat ceiling, and largely dark by virtue of their straight-edged specificity. There was no glow to them. Their light did not diffuse; the floor was pocked with shoulder-broad circles of sharp shine. From the center of the ceiling hung the interface; a thick column of yellowish spider silk thread, suspended still and solid as stone in the echo-dampened silence, narrowing to a point of longer strands a man's height up from the abyss-black floor. I cannot truly be certain that it was really spider silk, but its fineness, its sheen, its perfect parallel rigidity all matched what I have read of the nature of arachnid-sourced silk; particularly that of the dridrea. _How _the Altmer obtain so much of the silk of the spider daedra, if indeed they do, is an intriguing question indeed – but unfortunately not one to which I have found an answer.

I shared my speculations on the matter lately with Odfrin, but kept strictly silent as we inched our way down the inset ramp-etch in the wall, marveling at the strand's simple, stark grandeur. There was that in the air that precluded speech; an echo dampening vibe in the walls, the floor. We both felt it as soon as we entered; I saw Odfrin's breath still as my own thickened in my throat. It was not a place in which one spoke. We only watched, and wondered.

A figure materialized on the sea-inked floor far below, blinking suddenly into being in the cynosure of one of the spotlights nearest the dangling strand-column. An elf, of course; obscenely tall, and with nose and ears like curved knives, wearing a tight teal uniform that bared his flabby biceps and girl-curved calves. A simple mer; a working mer, though I have no idea at what. I never did decipher the caste uniform code of the Altmer; as much stock and complexity as the High Elves place in cloth and clothes, I doubt that I ever will, lacking an inside source. I caught Odfrin's arm, and we halted to watch. The elf bowed his head before the butter-gold beam of suspended spider silk as though in prayer, face and body cast into harsh, extremity-highlighted crags and crannies by the light above, hands limp at his sides, and for a long moment I thought that perhaps there was nothing more to it; only a certain degree of proximity was required for interface, and not actual contact – perhaps facilitated by basic telepathy. Then the truth became clear.

A single fray-frond lifted free of the mass of silk, needle-beaming in the light. It drifted toward the mer's bowed head as though toward a lightning-licked lodestone; slow, hesitant, questing as a blind octopus. Then – connection, and silk sliding across the skin of his forehead like oil atop water. His head rose, his eyes opened, and burned with an empty internal luminescence. His lips parted, and the shining strand snaked its way down his throat. The line of it tautened, pulling away further up the silk column, presumably as it wriggled further into the elf's esophagus, and as it did so a dozen or more rose up through the air, tendril-testing their way toward the elf; probed and floated and fumbled, and found flesh at last. They, too, slicked to his skin, and then slipped down over this thin lips and into the cavity of his mouth. More followed, in a quickening rush, a thickening cord, a skeining stream, and the mer's face crawled with a thousand silken strands. They filled his mouth till his jaw stretched wide and his throat bulged in his scrawny neck; spooled in his nostrils; wove webs round his eyes; stopped up his pointed ears; penetrated every exposed orifice of his face, and then each sweat-popping pore of the mer's fine elven skin until his entire head was cocooned in an offshoot skein of the main column, sealed in a stiffening mask of interpenetrating spider silk from the shoulders up. Odfrin shuddered at my side. I wanted to do the same; it was a horrific sight. But it was not done. For once his every entrance had been accessed by the interface, and his entire cephalic development subsumed in the strand, the mer began to rise. His knees eased; point-slippered feet lifted from the spotlighted floor; and the thick offshot cord tensed, and lifted him into the air by his head; lifted him up, and out, flashing through the room's spotlight-columns, until the mer was just a small silhouette far above us, a featureless black body twisting just below one of the strict streak-lamps, suspended by the strands sealed tight around his head, through his skin, inside his lungs, his stomach, his heart, his guts. And as we craned our heads in horror, watching the stranger's ascent, we realized that he was not alone, he was not the only interfaced elf hung high in that obsidian cylinder. There were fifty, a hundred more just the same; narrow silhouettes dangling below the ceiling's arachnid eye-array, suspended by their own skulls on shoulder-thick offshoot skeins split from the central strand at its spring.

Odfrin clutched my arm and buried her face in my sleeve, shaking her head in horror, but said nothing; the blanket of speech dissuasion had grown even heavier with the realization that the chamber was not unoccupied. I shared her disturbance; yes, I know that subcutaneous alignment is a more desirable and reliable form of interface and was an act made willfully by each elf, and not the bestial siphon system it seemed, but still, the vision of a hundred bodies suspended and a hundred minds subsumed in spider silk, seemingly dead in sense and soul, was not one whose effect I could easily shake. I knew that they merely communicated, that they merely intermingled minds, but it felt like they sacrificed their very selves. I turned away, unwilling to investigate the phenomenon further that day – though I highly doubt that the elves would have allowed me to do so anyway, had I tried – and Love and I sneaked our way back up the ramp-etch of the cylinder's side and out the narrow door near the ceiling. We kept our eyes down, away from the silk-strangled bodies. And in the metal-ribbed and windowed hallway outside the cylinder I held her close, and pressed a kiss to the lovely crown of her yellow-fuzzed head.

Now, though, I cannot allow myself the luxury of disconcertation; there is too much potential in this 'strand library' system, if it behaves as I think it does, to allow its workings to go unfathomed. If I can puzzle out how the elves have constructed a network that facilitates nontrivial transient entanglements between parties regardless of spatial displacement, then I can implement such a system of my own in Cyrodiil, and then the Empire entire. This strand interface is but one form; once I understand it I can invent any number of forms, and no need for such to be so disturbing. The benefits of such a construct to the Empire would be staggering; instantaneous communication between the capitol and any access point? I can hear the generals toasting me now. The College of Whispers would have the Legion on its side for generations, and most likely the Emperor himself, too. And there's no telling what manner of arcana could be worked with it; I have thus far only applied the force I discovered – I really, truly, need a name for that – to communication, but with an entanglement system accessible to any mage, why, innovation would bloom like the fields after flood. Who knows what might be possible? Essence bound spellwork of all kinds; troop teleportations and magicka annealments and enchantment reappropriation and a thousand other things.

And there's another aspect to it entirely, as well, if the edaphomancer's apprentice is to be believed. I mean, if the soil really _is _the transduction matrix for this strand library, and if its nature truly is the living, spiritual, consciousness conglomeration that soil-sorcery claims, then implementation of such a system in Cyrodiil would do far more than just grant us an instantaneous communication system; it would incorporate the very soil into our pool of assets. So the soil hoards magicka? Very well then; let us use it to our advantage. So the soil has a mind, of sorts? Very well then; let it think for us. I am envisioning a revolution in mental exercise; outsource routine calculations, simple accounting, and perhaps even basic design generation to the soil, and let our people put their minds to more creative tasks. The Julianites wouldn't be pleased, nor the accountant clans, but change or die has been humanity's creed forever; they'll adapt. Agriculture, too, might be benefitted by such; it might be possible to convince the soil to allocate resources to those places most critical to our production, with such a system. And of course the possibilities for the arcane are beyond imagination; I see conjuration masters utilizing the system to bind their atronachs and aureals to the very earth, and with ten times more efficiency and effectivenss for it; I see healers stabilizing souls with subsurface interconnectivity facilitated by my system until the mangled physical form can be repaired; I see alchemists incorporating earth magic to more fully mesh the aetherial material of their creations; I see artificers allowing enchantments to ripen in the soil before application; I see an Empire in which the College of Whispers controls the most important magical innovation since the rediscovery of recall; I see the death of the Synod.

Yes, the potential of such a creation cannot be denied. But none of that matters if the soil does not truly exist as a living body as I have understood it, if edaphomancy is wrong, or has been poorly comprehended by me. The possibility of that is very high, I will admit; this comprehension crystal is not easy to work. My knowledge is shaky, and at best preliminary. I feel there is much yet to learn, even if I have gotten it right thus far. And I am afraid that there is only one truly reliable way to confirm and enhance my understanding. I have been avoiding it since my arrival. A weakness, a failure, but still, I have been, and no avoiding that fact. But if I wish to progress, I must cease such refusal. I must swallow my pride.

I must speak with Tsirelsyn.

Jon Urfe

in correspondence with

Jon Urfe


	22. Chapter 21

**Chapter XXI**

RISE UP O YE OF JON! With courage, tarry not! Too long have you floundered in angst-membraned memory, in scrooge seclusion, in encapsulated self-absorption deep beneath ego's crust. Too long lost in Jon's sorrow! Too long sundered from sun! Rise up! Rise up! Rise up, through horizon and horizon, soil and soul and soil and soul! RISE UP TO GREET THE DAWN!

Hurry forth, now! Quick! The rays are breaking! Thrust open the door, thrust out your chest; stretch in the amber-brewed corridor, and then off, up, out; forth, into the solum's spire-inversion, the tangled interstice, the earth-musky labyrinth; forth to the arms of Arbasdiil! And there is the brinking, there is the blinking, there breaking of morn; past the last curve, through the last splinter-thin door, and the cavity of the solum's center whistles hale and hollow above your head; soil-stone walls glistening moist and slick in the grey light peeping down through the tiny-spotted dome high above, pocked and pimpled with balconies and bridges and stairways sprawling and spanning and webbing the gap. Breathe deep of the air; there all muskily musty, there all still, there all sweet in the lungs, quietly comforting after so long an accustomation, after so long removed from the surface's crisp cold sharpness. But that, too, awaits above.

A hitch in the moment, though; the tyranny of tense rears its ugly head. For, lower your eyes from the dilating egress, and find your feet on spongy moss-mounded soil, and the way ahead is a trail of river-rounded grandpappy pebbles winding through the solum's dim garden, between the blackened boles of the gnarled, twisted Alinorian spring-trees and the berry-proud bushes bobbing their pendulous pink-purple virility above sprig-sproutings of tender herbs and creeping, turgid, down-fuzzed succulents. The lattice-lights glass-netted and interwoven over it all, thunder-bug gentle but steady as the moons, shedding soft aether-amber fur down into the gloom of the garden. And not empty, oh no, not this time; neither crowded, but occupied: populated here and there by quietly strolling golden-skinned duets, wrapped arm in arm and hand in hand, centennially familiar fingers tangled together; couplets of elves, humming morning's greeting to each other and the earth, bending over bushes to pluck plump-bold berries and bowing brief greetings as their perambulating pairs meet on the stones and iron-gridded walkways. For this is Arbasdiil's Golden Grove at dawn, its doubled G in the grip of morning, and not a day goes by in that solum that the Kemendelia's fondness-fastened elves do not turn out to renew together their respective twin-hearted dreams with a conjugated contemplation, a silent stroll, a shared fast-breaking dram of precious amrita; milk-essence moon-glowing on their tawny lips, traded tongue to tongue. Love-led life has long been the way of the Altmer, and nowhere is the tradition more pronounced and faithfully kept than among the arcane agriculturalists, under the soft hand of edaphomancy. The spring pours purest at its source.

Jon had known that such was the custom almost since his arrival in Arbasdiil. The Grove had been empty on his first… tour, yes, but each and every one of those long, fruitless days spent pacing the glass bridge-tendrils over the fields above had necessitated that he pass through the broad, gloom-ridden garden serving as the soil-membrane separating the surface from the plunging haoma plantations below; he knew of no more direct path, and had not had the courage to query his servant. He had seen them there time after time; the thin-limbed, doe-delicate pairs of androgynous Altmer, the gist of all agriculture; entomologists and pathologists, agronomists and bacteriologists, horticulturalists and silviculturists; every productive discipline the Kemendelia possessed, gathered together in that stretching morning grove for a few minutes of peace and love before the rise of work. And, of course, there were Arbasdiil's edaphomancers; for the soil's sorcerers to omit a morning's visit was simply impossible.

He had never lingered to find them, though, nor to speak with any of the myriad other sweet-strolling couples who had certainly eyed him with interest and might have welcomed his conversation. Blasphemy, but things were very different in Alinor-rural from –urban, and most pronouncedly so at the cynosure of the Kemendelia. It was a different caste of Alinorian society entirely, and one long sundered from the lignifying high faluten remainder, and shunned, despite its integral importance and fundamental contributions to their culture. The Elves of the Kemendelia would not exactly _condone _the presence of a human in their midst, but neither would they exclude him once he was there. It was Jon's angst alone that had prevented the formation of therapeutic and informative relationships with the elves, not prejudice on their part. Jon chose to race pat the wandering mer without meeting their eyes, and reaped his lonely reward from those who would never, _could _never, choose to force themselves where they were not wanted. But not that day, no; not with the newfound knowledge in his head, the rekindled curiousity in his belly, the blooming friendship in his heart; not when Jon had just been returned, at last, to himself… or one of his selves. One of the more pleasant selves. That day he lingered along the meandering path, he poked about the primroses, he smiled at the arm-linked elves wrapped in the folds of their simple morning robes, and got surprised, uncertain smiles in return, along with a wake of whispers and shoulder-slung stares. That day he did not fear that he would be accosted by an elf in conversation; he welcomed the prospect. On the contrary; it was his object. And he attained it.

He stepped past the gangly, trailing limb of a voluptuous, hip-heavy rose, smiling and looking shyly down at his feet as a distinguished, grey-streaked old couple slipped past him with high-eyebrowed nods down from the heights of mer-hood, picking his quiet way beneath the amber lacework illumination toward the high splinter of a door at the garden's far end that was the entrance to Tsirelsyn's study - and came abruptly face-to-face with the mer's pet soil-sorceresses; Rumarene and Ilandra, arms looped comfortably around each other's leopard limber waists.

The pair drew back half a step in surprise. Rumarene's narrow eyebrows leapt up her forehead; Ilandra's mouth dropped into a perfect little 'o', and then both bloomed in identical astonished smiles.

"Why, Jon Urfe!" Ilandra exclaimed, her long, loose braidswinging behind her as she shook her head, like a startled horse. "Good morning!"

"Good morning, madame," Jon replied, grinning up at her a bit, satisfied with her surprise. "How does the day greet you?"

"Remarkably well," the fray-braided womer's slit-eyed companion stumbled out through her narrow, cheek-etching smile. "_Remarkably _well, Jon."

"I am glad of it," he answered, his eyes crinkling.

"So what brings you to the Grove this morning, Jon? We have not seen you much here. You are always so busy." Ilandra's rounder cheeks dimpled deft delicacy; they would not make him acknowledge his own follies. Jon blushed regardless, and shrugged his shoulders in their violet epaulets.

"Ah, well, yes," he said, "I have rather rushed through before, haven't I? Not much change there, I'm afraid; I'm not really here to enjoy your horticulturists' exquisite work. I'm looking for the Son, actually. I thought it was his custom to accompany you here, of a morning. I have not caught sight of him, though, so perhaps he maintains yet in his chambers."

Rumarene's narrow mouth fell open in an 'o' so identical to her partner's that it had to have been an unconscious imitation – though unfortunately less endearing on the shorter woman's sharper face. "You wish to speak to Tsiri?"

"Ohhhh, he'll be so delighted!" Ilandra gushed over her. "He has been waiting for you, you know."

"_Has _he?" Jon said in mild surprise. "I had no idea."

"He has," Rumarene affirmed with a quick nod, "but you won't find him in his study right now, nor here in the Grove. He was here, of course, but left off a bit early. He's in the fields, I think, overseeing the removal of that nest of colubridae in the western quadrant."

"Ah. Then he is occupied?" Jon's face fell slightly.

"Well, yes, but he's always occupied," Ilandra answered reassuringly, "and his occupation is never such that he doesn't have time for a word or two or three or four hundred with anyone who happens by. He's a dear that way. So don't delay, Master Urfe; go on up, and speak with him. Head west, once you attain the pylons; you'll find him, with my guarantee."

"You're sure he will not resent the interruption, madams?" the human asked uncertainly. "I can always find him later, after all."

"No, no, he wishes to speak with you!" Ilandra insisted. "Go on, Jon! Go on! Tarry not! Go on!"

Jon bowed his head, shaking and smiling and laughing silently in amused appreciation of her eager vehemence.

"All right," he said, "all right, then. I will go to find him above presently, since you insist." The soil-sorceress pair bobbed identical sculpt-chinned nods of approval. "My thanks for the direction," the human went on, turning and raising a hairy hand in farewell, "and a good day to you!"

"And to you, Jon Urfe!" their high, bell-clear Altmeri voices called after him. "And to you! Rise up to the Son, Jon! Rise up to the Son!"

And, aye: rise up to the Son and Sun. Rise up to greet the dawn. Now, with zip and zest! To the spiraling stairs; strafe along the side of the soil-stone cylinder, streak the span, legs pumping, heart thumping, lungs pulling sweetening suck from the air like milk, and the solum constricting, the walls whirling amber-eyelid backlights in on your ears, and yet the grey-white egress dilates ever wider, ever brighter, ever nearer, until – slam back the door! Crash free of the earth musk-mist! Stretch alone in the crisp-cutting wind, arms akimbo, raw-skinned and smarting in Kyne's sundering gasp, gum-blinking back the sudden brightness. Rise up! For here is the solum-surface, white and wavered, shell-ruffled and rose-bosomed, and here is the air, bitter and biting and whistling twixt you and the cave-wailing doorway at your back. Rise up! For here is the sky, blushing new mothers' mare-prayers over the lean-looming eastern peaks, thawing ice-slates to dripping dew above, and inky-winking with sleepy star bugs set in the midnight blue morass oozing across the valley's western wall. Rise up! For here are Alinor's glass-veined airways and pyramid-spire pylons, webbing net-knots above the dew-damp fields, effulging with amber awakening. Rise up! Rise up to greet the dawn! For here is the sun! Here is the Sun, fray-foraying its warp-woofed way across the city-isle! _Here is the tangled edge of dawn! _Rise up! Rise up! Rise up!

Jon's new-shaven cheeks creased tightly with his grin; with freshness, with newness, and the ecstasy of embarkation. The wind worked his light violet robes in tide-gentle ruffle. Day lay before him. Day, and its sun, and its Son, in all their promising possibility. The solum subterrane lay behind; the dome-capped cavity walled in webbed soil, and all its unexpected complexity, its dimensions deeper than depth, its comforting musky dimness. And ahead, the solum-surface; the shell-curve cloistered compound and its strange ramps and sudden gaps, its windowless white warehouses and oversized stables, its doorless elevators and scattered smattering of arcane agricultural instrumentation, its panoply of Kemendelial paraphernalia. And it was not the echo-empty husk of a facility that it had seemed upon Jon's first arrival; no, the place fairly well bustled with satin-uniformed goblins, hurrying to and fro with long arms piled high with odd, fluffy orange foam, towing lodestone-wheeled handcarts laden with silver-sacked somethings along shining strips of metal set in the stone, leading claw-hoofed black horses thrice as tall as Jon along to who-knew-where, comically small and squat before the majestic beasts. There were but few elves – only the unmarried, and that overwhelming minority dominated by the youthful, the widowed, and the exceptionally crusty; they hurried about in their long, thin linen Kemendelia robes of various cuts and designations with an ever so slightly melancholic air, with the consciousness that they really would all rather have a partner and yet be down in the solum's double G. Neither they nor the innumerable neatly accoutered goblin hordes took much notice of Jon, as he strolled his savoring, deep-breathed way through the compound's snaking streets; he was too quiet, too peacefully curious, too slanted to feminine interface to register overmuch in their senses. They entered into him, instead of he into them, and both remained all oblivious to it.

He slipped along through the shine-satined crowds, soft-footed and deft for all his broad, natural musculature, peering about over the bulbous, turbaned heads and letting his gaze catch its wondering net on every tiny snag; the great round-edged metal caskets stacked along the walls, through the seamless-gape of sudden doors, and every now on the shoulders of a goblin, the lightweight elven alloy hefted easy as empty hulls; the hangars of vicious, long –poled and –pronged hooks; the multi-tiered laundry fields of green-glass membranes and mucous, kept drenched and dripping by head-thick hoses borne on the backs of bowing goblins and splitting off dark, mist-huffing tentacles like the legs of millipedes. None of it was new to that eye, that single black eye of Jon's, for he had passed through that buzzing center of agricultural activity many a day through the last month and more, on his way to the silence-solace of the lonely, net-knotted fields - but in that eye's so newly reborn soil-sight, all of it was novel.

The whole length of Arbasdiil's wavered flank's traversed, Jon's feet found themselves firm on a ramp of glossy black glass, coiling up and away from the solum's southernmost gate. Its partner-pylon loomed massively before him, obscuring the view of the valley just as it sucked away the sunlight for its amber-weeping rhizosphere far below; overhead the solar saturated airways like lace-networked bridges of light, solid-shining and floating like firmament. His heart clenched… and Jon climbed; a lone human in a land shaped utterly by elves, tiny and insignificant and unafraid on that wide, spiraling black rampway. And his eye ached ever more with the effulgence of the broad roadway nearing with every turn of the rising coil, until he walked completely blind round the last curve, fingers trailing the hot body of the pylon for guidance, and stumbled finally forward on sudden flatness; caught his fall with a pink palm, and opened his black eye to the searing skyway, and its oozing, bead-drippings of sun-stuff.

He straightened up, squinting, and pushed himself back upright. The road stretched its slung-stretch to both sides, ribbed in dark spires. This was the very spot upon which he had been deposited so many weeks past by Aatheril and his leopard slinking carriage. He had not appreciated the beauty, the grandeur, the majesty of elf-sculpted Alinor, then, or on any of the other occasions that had found him there again, but that morning, in that dawn's fraying hem, he did. He looked out from the edge of Alinor's aetherial skyway with his single, squinting eye, out on the etch-terraced edges of the city-isle's emerald hillsides, rising step-wise to the abrupt stone boned mountains in the dawn-planed distance, out on the web of paths and roads and ways strung above it all, gleaming amber-acid in the east bust still dull and dim and dead at the valley's western edge, its day-dark pylons glowing hue-sapped star-bodied with photonic backflow and winking out one by one as the dawn's vanguard encroached ever forward. He looked out on Alinor's elf-artificed skin, and saw in it the possibility of beauty.

And if that, my friends, does not tell you that our dear Jon Urfe has been changed by his sight of soil, I do not know what will.

Still squinting but adjusted, somewhat, to the road's brilliance, Jon turned from his lean against the thick, corded wire rail. His goal recurred to him through his awed openness, and he swung his gaze across the terrace-strips west of Arbasdiil's walls, like a long-haired woman in the wind. Ilandra had said that he would find the eldest soil-sorcerer with ease, once he attained the skyways, and so he searched for the unindicated identification – and so found it, almost immediately; there, at the frayed, inching edge of dawn; there, a boiling froth of motion, a white foam of goblin activity in forbidden territory: the fields. A hundred or more tiny satin-uniformed figures bubbled and bustled about in the distance beneath the still dark net of glass footpaths, busying themselves between the terrace's pale walls. In their midst, two figures in tawny robes; looming and looming over the tiny goblins, but one a measure taller than the other. Tsirelsyn, Jon surmised, and another soil-sorcerer. No way else would even a single goblin be permitted to set foot on that precious soil. He grinned, and set off down the brilliant roadway toward the branching ramp that would lead him down to the narrow glass bridge nearest to the soil-sorcerers' site.

Edaphomancy does not bend its laws of trespass with ease, or without rigorous precautions and mitigatory measures. Though the hundred or so goblins Jon had spotted from afar were indeed down in the fields, down in the reflected dawn gleam of the terrace wall, they were not truly down upon the soil. A long line of virulently orange mats, like those he had seen earlier, had been laid through the center of the strip of terrace; a foot thick carpet spawning short, perpendicular spurs to either side onto the black earth. The curl-toed slippers of the shine-veiled goblins scuttling across it sank deep into the soft substance, presumably ameliorating whatever damage their travel might otherwise cause to the soil below. Drawing to a halt on the glimmering bridge just a short span above their heads, where the orange mat-path sprawled out from the stairs of the adjacent support spire, just a few feet from where the access stair had vomited forth a crowd of equipment – stacks of round-edged metal caskets, square racks on rickety, flat-bedded wheelers, coilings and coilings of waxy black hose, and several small, wagon-mounted, glass-bulbed contraptions - Jon leaned on his elbows against the crystal ward-wire and marveled at the seriousness of it all; the hyper-conscious care of each step, every goblin super soft-footed despite the soil's protection; the meticulous line-rigid work order, designed to minimize jostling and risk of a wayward foot or fall; the very delicacy and conscientiousness of each motion, the stiffness in those satin-wrapped slave spines with their possessors' evident unease at their task, as though some terrible consequence for error hung over them all. And perhaps there was, for those slaves did something Jon had not once seen in all his time in Alinor; they bared the soil. They worked in pairs, lined along the edges of the malleable mats, one of each wielding a long-poled scythe upon the verdant vegetation, and the other a rib-wicket of whitish metal to catch the shorn greenery before it could touch the ground, and to pull it back to the pass-along vein of slaves waiting in the center, there to be transferred back and up, stacked in neat twine-tied bundles of woody stems, aromatic fronds, and waxy greenery along an offshoot of the aerial footpath above. A good half mile of soil lay stubbled and black bare already along the hillside's easy-curved contour-cut, and goblins sliced away still more at the endeavor's frontier. After so long having seen soil bare only beneath the horizon, the sight of all that earth left wet and naked in the open air as it was left so often in his homeland struck Jon strangely – as though he had seen his mother stripped and beaten through the streets.

A deep voice echoed from the far edge of the effort, and Jon's eye jerked up. The towering figure of Tsirelsyn, properly clothed this time in the crisp, golden-brown robes Jon had seen on almost all of the Kemendelia's members while at their work, loomed like a parent over his children over the mass of white-satined goblins milling round about the level of his thighs. There was no sign of the other soil-sorcerer. The slaves seized up their tools at the first rumble of his throat, and devegetation ceased immediately. A river of shining metal flashed back toward the support spire's curling stair as both wickets and scythes were passed back along the line of slaves, to be stockpiled in white metal racks by a single, harried goblin just a few feet along Jon's pathway. Another, bending and pushing alongside the other but with a greater cheer sparkling in his wide black eyes, sent new utensils back in return; stout wooden mallets, with tooth-edged heads.

Tsirelsyn's voice boomed on regardless of the clattering activity, distant and indistinguishable. Then he fell silent, and turned to the side, and his companion sorcerer rose smoothly up from the earth upon which she had been hidden by the cramp of her kneeling crouch. Jon's lungs went numb. Red-gold hair, spun to a single cloaking sheet shrouded round her bare, golden shoulders and draped down to the ground, tiger stripe chatoyant in the flaring dawn and perfect complement to her father's thousand snow-beaming braids; Cehseekye, and Tsirelsyn, and Jon suddenly shunted into a state of supraconsciousness, a drum-thudding resonance of all that he was with all that his single eye saw. Father and daughter, Mother and Son, the two clasped solar-golden hands beneath the beams of creeping day, toes crinkling in the bared black earth, their goblin audience awe-silent in still satin strips stroked by the sun. Their heads bowed, their two heads and Jon's in sympathy; their two bodies sank to their knees in the soil and a hundred more followed; each and every goblin, prostrate upon their malleable mats, and Jon the only being still erect in three miles but even his knees wobbling with the tug of soil-sorcery. But utterly insensitive to his deviation, for all that; his eye was fixed upon soil-sorcerers, his attention to everything save their actions decayed to dust grating against the back of his skull. And, ah, their actions: sweet honey, suckled amber-thick from the teat of time, and thrumming as their knowledge oozed down Jon's throat; of the unraveling of her bistre-glossy sheet and its mingling with his milky fragmented strand-stream, snow to gilt lignin; of the twining of fingers, weaver's delicacy to farmer's thick callus; of the lightning thwump of air and hair haze-haloing their heads; of its sudden plunge, its sudden streak of head and hair and eyes and lips and mouth and tongue down, down, down to the ground, down through the earth, down into the soil, down into the womb-webbing of Nirn; of ochre sunlight effulging on the horizon, gilding skin and satin and her peach-flesh face, soft radiance and ripe-waiting; and of the sound of it all, the nascent explication, the aborted encapsulation, the fetal abrogation, a swallowed syllable, a word sealed in amber, and hot, moist, _wet _as woman sliding across his mouth, down his throat and to his belly, there to coil and roil and coil and soil and soil and –

And then it was over. Cehseekye and Tsirelsyn stood, their hair quite inexplicably back in single sheet and thousandfold braid bonanza respectively, both quite calm and easy with themselves and the world that saw them. They towered over the kneeling goblins; they shone like gods in the radiance of Alinor's tangled dawn. Tsirelsyn's broad hand touched his daughter's soft elbow, and her black-gold gaze fell to a single, abnormally small goblin's wild trembling at her bare feet. Her eyes softened, he could see it even from that distance, and with a swift gentleness she bent low to press a kiss to that oversized satin-sleeved skull. Then they were both striding away over their bowed slaves, doe-delicate long-toed golden feet picking deftly between the huddled lumps of lesser flesh. They swayed their graceful way back along the rows of goblins toward the support-spire near Jon's silence-struck spot, and bit by bit their servants picked themselves up out of their prostrate stupor, much as Jon's own brain shook itself out, and set sluggishly back to work.

Tsirelsyn saw Jon when they had covered nearly three quarters of the distance back along the stretch of bared earth. His ancient, smooth face split with long white teeth, like the sun from behind the gilt clouds of dawn.

"Jon Urfe!" his deep voice boomed. One huge hand rose quickly into the air. Behind him, Cehseekye looked curiously up, and the musculature of Jon Urfe jerked, nearly spasmed, with the recurrence of situation. "Why, Jon Urfe! Imagine you here!"

"No – need," Jon croaked out loudly in Tamrielic, managing a shaky smile for the Son's enthusiasm despite all else, "for I am here in truth!"

"What? And how does that mean we should not imagine you here?" The elf's smile was charmingly lopsided. "But never mind that now! Hold on there, and let us come up to you! I've been wanting to talk with you, and there's a womer here you should meet. My daughter, in fact. Hold on there, we'll be right up."

"No – no – need to hurry," Jon stammered, but the giant of an elf had already leapt into motion; his enormously long legs sent him springing over the heads of his goblins and toward the spire's stair with an incredible swiftness. His daughter followed more slowly, shaking her head silently with her hands pressed to her mouth as she ran.

It seemed only a second before the Tsirelsyn was emerging from the spire's dark stairwell, bursting forth like a bear from its den and striding swiftly toward Jon, enormous flat feet slapping the shining glass. For a moment, Jon thought – with some alarmed shock, in his shaken state – that the elf would embrace him; he came forward with arms held wide in his tawny, wrist-tight sleeves, broad face beaming, but at the last moment seemed to realize that his guest might not _quite _be ready for that, and instead merely bent low to nest his palms warmly around Jon's hands.

"Good morning, Jon!" he said radiantly. His face filled Jon's vision; the amber of those sundered eyes curling and glowing like nebulae. "It is an excellent day to greet the dawn!"

Jon could only smile, under those eyes, under that friendly, open face. "That it is," he said, switching into Altmeris after his initial fumbling stumble into Tamrielic. "Although – well, I had expected to find you doing the greeting – elsewhere." His words would not come smoothly, for some reason.

""Ah, yes, and usually you would have been correct," the elf answered in kind, releasing his hold on the human's hands. "But I had a bit of urgent business to which to attend this morning. Perhaps you saw?"  
Jon nodded after a brief pause to parse the elf's Altmeris. "I did, yes. I'm quite curious about it, actually. What were you…" But he trailed off, tongue slipping and stumbling on itself once more with sudden numbness. Cehseekye had stepped onto the shining stream of glass; slim, tall, doe-footed and satin-calved beneath the hem of her tight, practical-pocketed edaphomancers' robes, red-gold hair sheen-sheathing her supple body. Those huge black and gold eyes lit on her father, and then on Jon. Tsirelsyn missed not a step; in the same instant of her arrival he had his broad hand across her shoulder and was ushering her gently forward.

"This is my daughter, Jon," he said as the womer drew to a halt before the human, looking childsized next to her enormous father and making Jon even more conscious of his own shortness. "Mother, this is Jon Urfe, a scholastic ambassador to Alinor from one of the new Cyrodiilic establishments of arcane academia."

"A pleasure to meet you, madame," Jon managed, despite the heaviness of his tongue.

"You speak Altmeris?" she replied, bluntly surprised. Her eyes did not shift in their steady, reserved study.

"Not very well, perhaps," Jon answered with a hot little flush of embarrassment. "But yes, I do. Comprehension is my area of study, after all. I would be remiss were I to neglect the study of languages."

A swift look passed from the womer to her towering, sun-shading father; a fathomless spark from black and gold to black-gold.

"I was not aware that any among your people considered such phenomena objects for study in themselves," she replied, wide eyes fixed once again on Jon. "Interesting, to learn otherwise. And a pleasure to meet this rarity of a scholar. I am Cehseekye." Jon nodded a greeting, smiling with tight, dry lips.

"Jon professed himself curious, just as you joined us," Tsirelsyn said, with his own meaningful flash down to his daughter. "So what do you make of that?"

Cehseekye's full mouth tightened slightly. "What do I make of a curious human sorcerer-scholar of comprehension? Nothing, of course. That is your function, oh Son."

The enormous mer's lips quirked; a twisting of the same broad, lush mouth as his daughter's. "Ah, what a heartless girl. Never letting her father forget his shortcomings and unactualized self-realizations. Such a heartless girl."

Cehseekye rolled her eyes. "I'm the farthest thing from heartless, and you know it."

"Of course I do, Cehs. Of course I do. That is why you are so compassionate to your old sire, isn't it?" His daughter riposted sharply, and the big mer laughed.

Jon arched an eyebrow bemusedly as the two went sparringly back and forth further. He understood only the broadest gist of their exchanges, as they went on; the more they spoke the less their speech resembled any form of Altmeri Jon had ever encountered, as though they slipped by habit into some private speech form. He spoke up in a pause, as Tsirelsyn twinkled fondly down at his ironic-eyed daughter.

"So madame Cehseekye," he broke in, leaning back with his arms along the elf-apportioned wire ward and looking up at the two towering elves, "tell me; are you too a soil-sorceress?"

"Am I a soil-_sorceress_, then?" the mer replied gently. And, oddly, his eyes were crinkled with a soft, pleased smile. Cehseekye's lush lips pressed ever so slightly tighter, but she responded without attention to her father's interjection.

"I practice, yes," she said. "But not quite in the same way as any other."

"Oh? How so?" Jon pursued. He could barely believe he was managing intelligent conversation. His heart pounded with the violence of a blacksmith's hammer or of a small animal in life's own fear, and all the more disturbingly in that he had no reason in his mind to have been so affected. His every hair stood erect on his skin.

The womer slid yet another look up at Tsirelsyn. "I… take a different approach, philosophically."

"She means that she's a rebel," Tsirelsyn said, grinning with one side of his mouth, "and doesn't hold to the directives I established with the creation of the Kemendelia. But she may think as she wills; I do not hold with enforced orthodoxy. Dissent is her prerogative." He added the last with a sad little shrug.

"_How _does your philosophical approach differ, though?" Jon persisted, eye fixed on Cehseekye.

The womer's narrow, perfect, red-brown eyebrow rose. "Curious, indeed. But I do not think we should really tell you, yet, no matter how curious you are." Jon frowned, and she continued, unhurriedly. "Some things require pre-existent knowledge to successfully comprehend. Perhaps you have noticed this in your studies. It would be premature to explain my differences with my father and his Kemendelia to you now."

"I must agree, I'm afraid," Tsirelsyn said as Jon opened his mouth to protest. "It's none of it simple, Jon, in our field. We could explain it to you now, but we would have to start by explaining most of basic soil-sorcery, an endeavor which would take far more than just this afternoon. Best to start with the least intricate of complexities, if you are interested in real study. _Are _you interested in real study?"

"Of edaphomancy?" Jon replied, glossing resignedly over his resentment at the stymied query. "Well, yes, of course. That is why I am here, you must realize: to learn whatever I may, and share whatever I can. Your Thalmor assigned me to your society and solum without consultation, it is true, but that doesn't mean that I am not sincerely interested in your craft." His words came in a rush toward the end as his face heated with the newborn freshness of that truth.

"_Our _Thalmor?" Cehseekye repeated, her eyes suddenly hard and her mouth as tight as something so ripely full could be. "Our. Thalmor. I think not, Master Urfe. They are not _our _Thalmor in the slightest."

"Cehs," Tsirelsyn remonstrated, "you know that they are. They _have _to be, or we are theirs. Would you cut them to freedom?"

A rich blush rose in the womer's smooth cheeks, and the tips of her long ears glowed a hot sunset red.

"I cut nothing, Son," she snapped. "I free _nothing._" Her father just watched her silently, eyes serious and sad, and the blush ripened even further in her flesh.

Jon stepped hesitantly into the tense stretch.

"If we must begin with the more simple of your craft's mysteries," he said slowly, "perhaps you could explain your little task of today?" He turned slightly toward the bare field at his back, where the white-satined goblins were still at work. "So much bare earth – I'm surprised."

"Are you?" Tsirelsyn said, ever so slightly surprised himself. "You should be, actually. It's normally quite forbidden. And I suppose that that's as good a place as any to start in on." The white haired mer stepped up next to Jon, leaning on the wire-ward and looking out on the stretch of terrace below. His daughter stood still, arms stiff at her sides and mouth set in a hard line. Her stare switched steadily between her father's net-veiled back and his human's flinch-flickering eye.

"Ordinarily we would never allow the soil to remain bare like this," he began, opening a broad palm and gesturing downward and utterly ignoring the womer behind him. "It is one of the very worst states possible for any soil, its lack of protection allowing rampant erosion, structural disintegration, and exudation of contained ideoplasm and aetheria."

"Excuse me, father," Cehseekye slid smoothly into the gap of the mer's words, "but I will take my leave now, if you do not find it too much of a dissent. I think I will do some checking around."

"Around what?" Jon found himself asking before Tsirelsyn could respond. The womer's steady stare turned slowly down to his blinking eye.

"The nearby terraces," she answered simply. "The procedure can cause some unpredictable results in abutting pedons. It is better to monitor for them." Those eyes. Jon nodded his understanding, but his everything was drowning in that black and gold.

'Go to it, Cehs," Tsirelsyn consented easily, unperturbed by the chill in her tone. "I will see you soon. Be ready."

"I will, father," she answered with the slightest of exasperated inflections tinging the flat plane of her voice. Her eyes returned to Jon's. "It was good to meet you, Master Urfe. Fare you well."

"Likewise, madame. Perhaps when next we meet, you will find me more ready to understand your deviance." The quirk of her lips shouted her doubt. Jon bent a quick bow, eye never leaving the womer's heavy-lidded gaze. Her chin dipped a tiny nod, and with a quick, easy turn of her bare heel, the edaphomancer's daughter set off along the shining suspension, her tawny robes whipping and shadow-stripped in the rising wind, shine-striped in the rays of morning's yawning awakening. And Jon's eye cleaved inextricably, inexplicably to those soft shoulders retreating, to that wave-rippling sheet swirling crown to ankle and sheening streaked amber ooze, until long after the details became indistinguishable and the soil sorcerer at his side began to speak once more.

And even then he stared, with his skin everywhere a prickle and the tingle of bubbling blood gurgling strangely

in the emptiness

of his eye.


	23. Chapter 22

**Chapter XXII**

"It _is _unusual," Tsirelsyn resumed, leaning on his elbows looking down on the bustle of goblins in the terrace-field below, broad back slightly hunched to bring his head nearly level with Jon's. "It is unusual that we should leave the soil bare. A matter of extremity. We allow it only because this soil's ailment is more detrimental than its exposure, in the long term, and requires such for its cure." Below, a long line of goblins had formed up along the center of the carpet of protective matting, pulling in tandem a thick black hose free from its coiled nest, stretching it out toward the end of the bared segment of soil. "You see, this portion of land suffers from an infestation of colubridae, or groundsnakes. To remove them, we must unfortunately bare the soil surface."

"Colubridae?" Jon repeated curiously. "Groundsnakes? And what problem is that, for the soil?"

Tsirelsyn's mouth twisted. "A legion of problems, I'm afraid. Colubridae are tunnelers, you see. While one might think that a bit of aeration would be beneficial to the soil – air content is indeed a vital component to the health of a pedological mass – that produce by burrowers such as the colubridae is, in the long term, undesirable. The problem is that the soil _around _their passages becomes compacted, disallowing the penetration of roots, and essentially negating the positive effects aeration might have produced. Colubridae are also antagonistic to many of the minutiae in the soil which coexist beneficially with our plants. Naturally, that results in a decrease of plant growth, and thus of organic accumulation."

"I… see," said Jon slowly. "And what is the importance of all that?" In the field below, the line of goblins wriggled busily, affixing hundreds of short sections of small tubing to ports on the central hose, like legs to a millipede. The black-bare earth crinkled and creased with the stretching shadows of stubble and duff in the stretching dawn. "Of a decrease in organic accumulation, I guess. You seemed to imply that that in itself would be detrimental to the soil. Why?"

Tsirelsyn flicked an unreadable look sideways at Jon out of the creased corner of one black-gold eye, then settled a little lower on his elbows. "Soils are dynamic systems, Jon. They never remain static. They are maintained by the balance of certain – forces, we can say; those which lead to the creation of soil, and those which lead to the destruction of soil. Soils are always being created, and always being destroyed. One of the effects of an infestation of colubridae is to decrease the rate of creation. The effect is almost always extreme enough to shift the balance into the debit net; which, over time, will lead to the complete destruction of a soil." His broad face had gone serious and set, staring down at the busy goblins, his voice dipped from its earlier cheerful tenor to a deep, ever so slightly wheezy bass – and for the first time, Jon thought he could see a hint of the mer's true age.

"Our dedication as edaphomancers is to the prevention of such destruction," he said. "And, more, to the enablement of pedogenesis – soil creation. We are here to create soil. So we do not allow anything that can lead to the death of a soil. When a nest of colubridae is found – and it is not so uncommon – we flood the soil they have invaded, and force them from their copulation-cribs with the water their precious cousins love so. And then we kill them." His shoulders shrugged with a resigned, hoarse little sigh. "It is a shame, truly. I am not proud of it. For colubridae have a great potential to increase the soil's resilience, as well, when their numbers are small and only few individuals have entered sexual maturity – in that stage, before copulation, colubridae create an incredibly healthy, vibrant soil, for the emanations of their flesh are salutary rather than antagonistic to soil minutiae. Unfortunately, life takes its course with them, and the serpents always begin mating. We have attempted thousands of suppressant substances and sorceries through the centuries, but found nothing of sufficient efficacy. The force of recombination is truly irrepressible in the reptilian gestalt. And so we kill." He said the word without disgust, without resentment, without despair, but only with a deep, aching sadness; an old man kissing the grave of the wife he knew could not have been saved. "We kill, and the colubridae are gone for a time – but they always resurface somewhere else. They are incredibly resilient. We have been systematically eradicating them from our island for thousands of years – but still they persist." He paused, and gave a little shrug. "Ah, but there is no surprise there. Quinoa is a _part _of soils, and it will find its expression. It is necessary."

Jon's brow tightened, and his eye opened wide as he turned to stare past the mer's curtaining fall of bright white braids. "What did you say, there?" he asked, barely believing he had heard what he thought he had heard. "Kinwuh? What is that?"

"Quinoa?" Tsirelsyn sighed. "Well, now you are truly delving into it, Jon. Are you familiar with the theory of fundamental forces?" The human shook his head mutely. "Ah. I did not expect you to, truthfully, but I have been surprised by the extent of a mainlander's knowledge many a time before. It is better to hedge one's bets." A wry smile crossed those wide, full lips, and a flash of ironic eyes sparked past the mer's braids. "It's a very old Aldmeri traditional thought construct that I reference, Jon. A venerable school of merrish philosophy, maintained by a handful of disciplines into the contemporary age; among those with which you would be familiar, the mysticism of Artaeum. Not to delve too deeply into its details on our first talk, the theory's basic premise holds that our world functions based on the interactions of eleven fundamental forces, or laws of nature. You may have heard these called 'earthbones' by others. My craft – edaphomancy – is concerned with all of these, but with three primarily. Quinoa is one of these." A short pause, as though in hesitation. "I spoke of the forces that create soil, and of the forces that destroy. Quinoa is our name for the latter."

A hundred candles burst into flame in Jon's head. "I see," he stuttered out past his surprise-snatched tongue. "And – do these colubridae possess some great measure of this force, this quinoa?" He could only think to draw the mer into elaboration.

"Possess?" the edaphomancer replied with a little jerk of his huge head that sent his braids asway. "It is a force of nature, Jon. It cannot be possessed. It is an interpenetrating fact of reality; everywhere, simultaneously. But that's technical clarification; what you meant, I think, was 'do they express quinoa?' and the answer to that is yes. We all do, really. To differing degrees we are all transceivers, automata animated by the interactions of our own wills with the wills of the world. In many ways, the world expresses itself through us, and through all other living creatures – but, though we all express each of these forces to some degree, we are not all receptive to them in the same proportions. Each individual is unique, but receptivities do tend to fall out along cultural – and consequently, racial – lines. It happens that colubridae express quinoa, the force motivating all of this world's separations, much more than they express any other. And so, this," he said, letting a large golden palm fall open toward the bare earth below. His eyes, heavy-lidded and lazy like his daughter's, drooped half-closed against the light of dawn fringing his profile in golden fray. A sudden, sputtering gasp coughed out from the glass-bulbed wagon-wheeled contraptions a few yards away amidst the forest of racks and stacked metal caskets, and then a low whirring purr rose through the air; the tending goblin sprang backward, clapping its paws, and the interior of the devices' bulbs beaded abruptly with liquid. The air warped before Jon's eyes with sudden humid heat-haze; the back of his neck crawled with sticky dampness.

"We draw the water from the air for miles around," Tsirelsyn explained, nodding to the whirring devices and the inflating trail of hoses down the stair and along the center of the exposed soil, "using extremely precise instrumentation and exact calculations on the amount of water that will saturate the soil to field capacity. The snakes flee the water for breath, and we kill them as they emerge." Like a resuscitating snail, the hose inflated, stiffening its millipedinous legs one by one and dribbling its dark ichor out onto the stubbled ground. Its honor guard of goblins waited along its length, hefting their suddenly ominous black-streaked mallets and watching the wetting earth.

"I see," Jon said, after a long pondering pause. "Interesting." His mind was too busy incorporating the mer's words into his knowledge of soil to make any more response.

"It is a failure on my part, really," Tsirelsyn said sadly. "A great failure." He stared down at the blackening spread of water below, broad mouth set in self-directed sternness, outlined in crisp creases.

To that, Jon roused. "How is it a failure?" he asked. "You are simply fulfilling your discipline's duty."

Those full lips melted easily into a soft smile of appreciation, and the mer winked slowly at the human to whose height he hunched. "Not a complete failure, no. But a failure nonetheless. Because you see, Jon, I – and all other edaphomancers with me – am dedicated to quinoa's opposite, to the force that creates soil. I am dedicated to the force that links us together, that binds us, that entangles the world as one, and that creates all soil. I am dedicated to the force of intimacy's memory; I am dedicated to love; I am dedicated to ambericity. And to be true to that force, to be true to ambericity, I must not discriminate in my actions; I must not choose what stays and what goes, I must not cut out that which harms, but embrace it tight and weave it into the world. I must not kill the colubridae, but enfold them into the soil system in such a way that they cannot but be harmonious and helpful to us all. This is the true path to success, and prosperity… and I have not been able to accomplish it, even after all these years of study. A great failure, on my part – but, well, I suppose there is still time to rectify it. One day, maybe, I will find the answer." The earth below darkened in a creeping wavefront seeping out from the seeping, weeping black slug-drooping insect legs. The soil drank the water like a sponge; no sooner did it touch the surface than it sank into the earth's tangled embrace.

Much as Jon had soaked up the edaphomancer's latest explanations; like soil that has found that its own immutable stock of water is not the sole measure of hydration known to the world; like a man in shock and awe that the subject of his greatest private cherishment is esteemed alike by another; like a scientist who has found his greatest discovery long since preempted, and the nymic right long since stolen. For in the edaphomancer's words, in his talk of a force that bound and tangled and wove the world together, Jon recognized the very same force that he himself thought to have discovered, recognized his life's work rendered obsolete by millennia, and recognized the abruptly vital importance of his acquisition of the edaphomancer's knowledge. He was a shattered mirror focusing the beam of an investigation scope; he was paralyzed shock mingled with devastation and overwhelming curiousity.

"Amber – ambericity?" he managed to choke out. "Could you… explain that a bit more, by any chance?"  
Tsirelsyn smiled a soft, understanding smile, and the meaning of his exchanges with his daughter on Jon's focus of study suddenly clicked clear; they had known right off that he shared their field, and that he did not realize. For, yes; entanglement, in both cases. Ambericity. "Certainly I can, Jon. While edaphomancy concerns itself with all of the eleven forces, there are three which bear greatest relevance to soil than the others. One of these is quinoa, the source of sundering. Another we call 'aurgone,' and is encapsulated most fully by the phrase 'conjugative consciousness.' The third is ambericity, quinoa's opposite; the memory of intimacy that draws all things together. This force is that which is central to our craft, and that which enables all soil-sorcery. Our work is not accomplished primarily by the manipulation of aetherial creatia, as are most forms of arcana with which you will be familiar, but rather by the manipulation of the laws of Nirn herself; by the manipulation of ambericity. In some sense, then, we are not truly sorcerers at all, but rather 'agricultural engineers,' or architects. Mechanists, not magicians."

"Yes, I understand," Jon replied with quick intensity. The fields flooded below, forgotten. "I have some familiarity myself with such techniques, as you have sussed out already. But what _is _the entanglement principle, really? What _is _this thing you call ambericity?"

"To answer that, Jon," Tsirelsyn said, his eyes gleaming with excited pleasure, "we must turn our attention back to the very beginnings of this world. You will know, of course, that this world was created by the gods, eight or nine or twelve of them, howsoever you may choose to number them. But the gods did not simply take the stuff of aetherius and simply build the world, like a man constructing a house, but rather _gave of themselves _for its creation. They built the world from their own being. This plane on which we live, this Mundus, is a conjunction of divinities; it is a joining of principal personalities. It is made from the gods themselves. And that, too, you will know, for your people sing its song through the long years of your ancestry. What you may not know, however – for so few do, among any people – is that the gods are both gone _and_ dead."

Jon did not even blink. "How so?" was his answer, delivered with unshakeable focus.

"Well, you know of the Sundering of Convention, of course," the mer said, and went on at Jon's perfunctory confirmation. "Common knowledge holds that only the betrayer of the gods, the trickster Lorkhan who convinced his twin Auriel Time-Dragon to participate in creation, perished as a result of that event, but in truth all of the gods both perished _and _fled in the Sundering. It could not be otherwise. They had joined themselves together as one being, one Mundus, and the death or separation of one meant, inherently, that of all. I said 'dead and gone' purposefully; for each god that fled the Mundus also left some measure of their being here. And of course, we must know this, for the gods are the very substance of this existence of our very _souls' _existence - and exist we do, despite their absence. Their planets remain in the sky, alive, true, but they do not influence the remains of their aborted child as do the Daedra, for they are weak with their sacrifice and unable to overcome on their own the remnant power of the Sundering. Men and elves worship them, yes, and do indeed receive divine blessing in return – but only avolitionally, in reflexive response from those parts of the gods that remain here on Nirn. These are the earthbones, the dead laws of nature; all worship of the gods of creation acts in resonance with these dead remnants, and not with the living god-planets themselves."

The enormous mer paused for a long moment, flicking an inviting glance at the staring human at his side and watching the near full-flooded field below absently. Jon said nothing, despite the mer's considerateness, and Tsirelsyn's deep, faintly wheezing voice continued.

"This is the basic premise of the theory," he said. "The idea that the living gods themselves are long gone, long sundered from us, and only their earthy bones remain as nonsentient, nonconscious laws of nature that can be manipulated and expressed by mortals. Ambericity is but one of these natural laws. It is the remnant force of the spirit whose acceptance and understanding served as the glue for the entire endeavor of creation, the spirit who bound all the others together as one. You might call her Mara, the Mother of Mundus. Her remnant, ambericity, does much the same as she; it binds. It entangles. It is the pervading power of love, present within every particle of existence, that provides us some measure of consolation in our mortal exile. It is the world's memory of the Dawn, when all was one, all was intimacy. And thus do we call it; for amber is the hue of dawn."

And ponder that now, you; ponder as Jon did, staring down into the black soil's bare skin of water below, saturated at last, where the millipede-legged hose lay limp and empty and the goblin horde hovered with anxious eyes at the edges of their brilliant matting, hefting their heavy clubs. The world is made of dead gods. The world is made of dead gods. The world is made of dead gods. The world is a shattered conjunction of first concepts. Consider that. Consider edaphomancy; the art of the manipulation of the world-mother's shriveled umbilical cord. Consider, as Jon did, that this is his craft, his skill, his dedication. Consider what he shared, unknowing, with the hosts of his exile. Consider, and ponder, and think, and then tell him what it means for you.

"Look," the Son spoke into Jon's stunned silence. A red-gold fingernail pointed down to the wet-sheening soil. "The colubridae come."

And so they did; writhing, wriggling, worming, squirming their slender-muscled way up from the sopping earth. They squelched from the soil like flesh from a meat grinder. They glistened like swollen tongues twisting across the bare field, twining and climbing across and upon one another in mounting tangles, in panicked attempts to escape the wet. And when they found that this would not save them, they flipped their focus; they flopped, they flailed, they slithered as though with one mind toward the only available escape: the thick orange mats in the center of the terrace's wet stretch, where white-satined goblins waited with mallets in their nervous hands. The shining gleam of dawn in the net of bridged pathways above cast their veiled faces into shadowed nests of crushed velet, glimmering with shining gems, with crying crystals.

The first serpent raised his waving head above the edge of the matting, flickering a swift-hopeful tongue; _safe is it safe it's safe I'm saved we're saved; _and then thrashed senselessly as his tiny brain squelched out through his slit nose and his frail little skull splintered like juicy fruit under a goblin's toothed mallet. The scent of his blood on their tongues only maddened his brethren; they whipped into an even more panicked frenzy, and the center of the field swiftly became a roiling battlefield, a writhing assault, a hammered massacre, as mallets thumped, feet stamped, spines split, and scales crumpled, as goblins leapt madly about, squealing and screaming and striking friend as a much as foe with their flailing weapons, as colubridae slithered frantically between legs, under feet, up trousers, and, for the luckiest, into the mouths of the drooping hoses, there to hide, little hearts pounding justified fear just as much as those of their hunters slammed with senseless terror, until all was quiet and their heart-scarlet scales would not be noticed slithering free and back into the fields. But this last was only a very few; a handful, compared to the thousands that lay still and stiffening in the rising sun when the slaughter had done and the goblins sat in shuddering huddles, cleaning snake-gore from the heads of their mallets and comforting particularly those unfortunate enough to have had a serpent seek refuge within their uniforms. The field's center had become a carpet of carnage.

"A shame," Tsirelsyn said sadly when it was all done, shaking his head. "A very great shame. They only attempt to live the lives they have. It is not their choice to be what they are. Their actions are necessary. They did not choose them. And yet we kill them. It is a very great shame."

"Your actions are necessary too, Son," Jon said delicately, raising a hand and almost touching the mer's hunched shoulder. "You do what you must. And they are only snakes."

The mer shook his great white head. His throat bobbed with the tangled torture of a sob and laugh together. "There is no 'only,' Jon," he said, facing the human fully. His eyes drooped at their edges, gone dim and dull. "That is the crux of the matter. All of us were once one individual, in the Dawn. You, me, those snakes. How can I say 'only' to any part of what was once my own flesh?"

"I cannot," he continued when his gaze had twisted deep into Jon's eye. "I cannot say 'only.' I cannot discriminate. But yes, you are correct that I must. I must do what I do here today, to prevent greater transgression. For the greater good, I think they say in Skyrim. But I do not call an act of hate and cruelty 'good' simply because it is necessary for progression. This _must _be done, but still, it should not be. I search for another solution, still."

"I wish you luck," Jon replied after a moment of nonplussed uncertainty. This was not behavior he had ever expected from an elf.

The mer turned a soft, patient smile on the human. "You tolerate my sentimentality very sweetly, Jon," he said. "My thanks. But enough of that! I will not trouble you further with my simple, private sorrows. Come, ask me more questions. I would feed your curiousity." He leaned on just on elbow, the upper quarter of his body thrust out over open air such that his head remained on a level with the upright human's. "What would you like to hear?"

Jon gathered his thoughts under the mer's waiting, twinkling eyes. "Well," he began. "I _do _always have more questions. I noticed – well, are your goblins _afraid _of the colubridae? They seem a little shaken up." He nodded down to the recuperating huddles of satin below.

"Oh – well, yes, they are rather," Tsirelsyn answered with a short laugh. "A superstition, they might call it in Cyrod, but in Alinor many fear serpents. They sense the power of the groundsnake's gestalt, and dread that it might wreak more on the world."

Jon nodded. "I see, Well, all societies have their supersitions. There is no shame in them. If I could ask another, then –" the mer nodded with a wide grin, " – may I ask just what sorcery it was you were working, when I first arrived? The procedure here is remarkably simple, it seems, so I'm curious why any arcana was necessary. Also, why use these complex contraptions?" he added, nodding at the glass-bulbed machines sitting and silenced amidst the rest of the goblins' paraphernalia. "Why take the water from the air?"

"Curiousity indeed; two at once!" the old mer commented with a dry chuckle. "You may ask, certainly, and I may answer. We purify water directly from the air because it is, in essence, the only way to obtain pure water – and impure water is death to soils. A complex issue, that one. Probably more than we have time for now. But remind me later, and I will explain. As for our sorcery – or our engineering, rather," he continued, "that, too, stemmed from our use of water. As I mentioned, the exact amount of water necessary to just barely flood this area, without excess standing on the surface, was calculated – by my daughter, actually – and we only wished to extract just that much from the surrounding atmosphere. Hydrostatic flow through soils, however, is a complex and dynamic process that does not prove friendly to specifically directed applications. To ensure that our procedure affected only the calculated area, then, Cehs and I modified the soil at the edge of the area, creating a band of soil with increased pore space in order to impede the flow of water."

Jon's brow lowered in confusion. "Excuse me? You _increased _pore space to impede flow? Isn't that the _opposite _of what you should have done?"

"It would seem like it, wouldn't it?" the mer said. "But no, actually. As you can see, it functioned exactly as we intended." He jerked a blunt chin (blunt for an elf, at least) to the still-sopping field below, whose wetness was clearly and sharply delineated. The goblins had finally begun to gather themselves together again; their clustered huddles were breaking up into flurries of white-clad bodies hurrying about to begin the clearing of the carnage, like bustling albino bees.

"How, then?" Jon asked. "I don't see _how _it could work, even though I see that it does."

"Ambericity, Jon. It acts at so many levels, and so pervasively. It is not something that acts only in isolated instances, but rather a constantly functioning force, present in nearly every event. Even simple physical contact," the warm pad of one large finger lit lightly on Jon's arm, tickling against his black hair like the kiss of a butterfly, "is enough to cause a degree of entanglement. A small degree, but multiplied by the enormous number of interactions taking place at once, it is significant. This kind of entanglement is simple, unlike many; it merely causes an attraction between two objects. Some interpretations of the phenomena hold that in fact this relationship is pre-existent, that all physical objects are weakly entangled, and that its effects merely become apparent as the two objects near one another. I hold to this interpretation myself, for the attraction seems to begin prior to the actual physical contact. Quinoa, incidentally, has the opposite effect; it repels, and overcomes ambericity's pull at extremely acute distances." He paused, wetting lips dried by the desiccated air. "Now, how does that relate to your question? Well, water – or anything else, really – goes where the balance between attraction and repulsion is the greatest; that is, it will move in a composite path away from that which repels it and toward that which attracts it. If these two are directly opposed, it moves according to the strongest effect. This is just as true in the soil as anywhere else. The air of the soil is usually saturated with water already, and consequently does not have much attraction for soil water when compared to the attraction of the matrix itself; it is far more attracted to the aggregates in the soil than to the air in the soil. So when water flows through a soil, and comes suddenly to a region of greater pore space – a region with more air, and thus, inherently, less attraction – it has very little motivation to enter into it, because there's so much soil nearby of greater attraction. And in this way, a band of increased pore space in a soil can actually impede hydrostatic flow. Counter-intuitive, I know. That's why edaphomancy is so important."

"Huh," Jon grunted. "Wow. Yes, if that is the sort of useful revelation your craft creates commonly, I can see why your people are in command. I didn't know it was so complex. Will water ever enter the band, then?" he asked, but stumbled forward over his own words, even as the mer began to speak, his mind working a step behind his mouth. "Wait, of course it would; if it moves wherever it is most attracted and there is enough water present to satisfy – saturate – the attraction of the entire soil matrix, then wouldn't it move into the larger spaces?"

Tsirelsyn bit his tawny lips in a pleased smile. "Yes, Jon, exactly so. No two pieces of water can occupy the same space, so as those spaces nearest the soil colloids, where the attraction is the greatest, are occupied, additional water experiences a lesser attraction. Eventually this becomes enough for the water to move into the larger pores. You are an excellent student, Ambassador Urfe."

Jon looked down shyly. "You are very kind, Son. I have made it my life's work to learn and understand. Good to hear that I am at least somewhat successful."

"More than somewhat," Tsirelsyn replied kindly. "A deal more. Not everyone grasps the concept so quickly, you know. You have come an impressive way into the craft on your own. That is rare." And at that touch on the pulse of the conversation's undercurrents, Jon shook his head down at the gleaming wire ward under his arms, smiled a pleased, embarrassed smile, and let the mer's pause stretch into a comfortable silence.

The goblins had cleared nearly all the bloody, tongue-limp remains of the massacre; had thrust them hurriedly away into dark sacks with gloves splatter-stained grind-raw pink with the swiftness of mingled fear and revulsion. A crowd of ten or twelve lumbered back up the pylon's stair to the glass bridgeway, hunched under the bulging body bags on their backs, and the rest formed another long transfer line, passing off their bloodstained mallets back to the harried little goblin working the mobile storage racks. In return, the stacks of round-edged caskets were dismantled by their brethren and set bobbing along down the chain over the many veiled, bulbous heads, pushed and passed by huge, spidery hands.

"See there," Tsirelsyn spoke into the silence. "Now they begin post-treatment care, to ensure our actions here had no adverse effects. In those casks is contained pure humus, or stably decayed organic matter, generated by my Youngest edaphomancers – you know them, Rumarene and Ilandra. This is some of the very best material one can give any soil. It will be spread over the earth, here, and then covered with a protective layer of dried kelp straw, to prevent it from blowing or washing away. Later, we will char the vegetation we removed and return it to its place of birth. We do everything we can to promote the health of our soils, and to ensure that pedogenesis ever outpaces pedonecrosis."

"I can see that," Jon murmured, his eye on the busy figures ratcheting open the many metal casks with loud, ringing clicks, to carefully spread the soft, crumbly black material across the wet earth, his mind turned inward still on what he had learned and what he had yet to ask. The edaphomancer let his silence lie, stretching his long body out from its hunched huddle, arms supported on the gleaming ward-wire. He sighed with the relaxation of position, and watched the business below. He waited, in his polite, understanding, edaphomantic way, the final question he could feel burbling in the heart of the hairy-handed human at his side. It was not in him to push or press; he let Jon's curiousity build to its own terminal pressure. A strange realization for an elf, it may seem, the idea that the truest confidences, the soundest relationships, are those developed naturally on both sides, without the design of prompt and precognition. But as should already have been obvious, Tsirelsyn and his Kemendelial ilk were not normal Alinorian Altmer. These were not the resentful, racist mer of Alinor-urban, but elves of an older cultural breed, fostered from a deeper racial spring. These were elves whose lives lay in the earth, not the sky; elves whose labors were dedicated to the memory of intimacy, to the world's single security skein, to the only piece of its mother mortals can still know. They were closer to priests than to sorcerers. They did not worship as did men and the majority of their own people, recognizing the futility of faith in the face of ineffable separation and the greater efficacy of engineering, but the difference between their philosophical constancy, subtle science, and mechanistic manipulation of the world's Law of Love and traditional merrish or mannish worship of Mother Mara would have been lost on most observers. The two are family, yes, but the long-since shriveled umbilical cord between the two was not oriented as history might lead you to expect.

And that is why Tsirelsyn's behavior toward Jon that day – his easy, accepting manner, his focused attention, his openness, his guileless desire to interface as fully as he could with this new person in his life even to folding himself nearly in half to see the world from Jon's height, was not out of character. You have been shown edaphomancy's precepts; now recognize their consequence in its practitioners. Recognize that Tsirelsyn, the Son, the creator of the craft, could not do other than let Jon speak in his own time. It was necessary. And of course, under that sort of subtle subsurface machination, so too was Jon's response.

"I think I have one more question," he said, when the stretch of field below had been covered steppe –wall to –ledge with pale green, shredded kelp, dry and flaky but too dense to carried by most winds.

"Then please, ask it," Tsirelsyn answered. His thin, trailing trailing net of braids glittered like fresh snow in the dawn.

"It's just – why soil?" Jon burst out forcefully, not meeting the edaphomancer's eyes. "You're not just some highly intelligent farmer, doing this because it's the most effective way to produce a crop. You're dedicated. You said it yourself. This is more than just a job for you. You are dedicated to the entanglement principle, to ambericity." The mer nodded gravely. "So why choose to pursue that in agriculture? You could do so many things with this force. You could have specialized in communication, like me, or in so many other fields. This force, this ambericity – it has incredible potential. So why choose this? Why choose soil?"

Those broad, firm lips widened in a slow smile. His answer came with the warm smoothness of melted honey, the pleasure of a mer's explanation of his greatest joy. "I did not choose the soil, Jon. Nor did the soil choose me. We simply – happened to each other. It holds me close, Jon, in so many ways. Soils are the most complexly entangled systems in existence. Anywhere. We understand so very little about them, even after all of these years, all these millennia that I have sunk my feet into the earth. Why should I choose to specialize in one aspect of ambericity's applications, sacrificing all others, when my study of soils _requires _my study of all of ambericity's aspects? Soils cannot truly be understood from just one perspective, just one background. You cannot just study agromancy and expect to understand what is going on in the earth beneath your agriculture; soils are too complex for that. We must study not only agromancy, but arithmancy and gematria and vivisectional reconstitution, transmutative biosis and materialistic arcana and simple earthbone-incited phenomena and noumena. Soils are confluences of parts animal, mineral, miniscule, magickal, temporal, spatial, and mythical, and we must understand all of those aspects separately to even begin to comprehend their entangled interactions that we call 'soil;' we must understand how plants grow and respond to their environment, how animals at all levels macro to micro interact with each other, with vegetation, and with their abiotic environment, how both of those influence and are influenced by fluctuations in the cosmological context and the flow of creatia. We must understand how motion is produced in both living and nonliving materials, how different materials react with one another at the level of principle particles, how the patterns of mythical geology contribute to the alterations of the world. We must understand the nature of creation and its inception and the continuing role of mythopeia in its development. We must understand the interlinked workings of time and space, matter and energy, dragons and snakes, one and one. We must understand how the actions of sentient beings, magical, mental, and mundane, affect all of the rest, how we communicate and how our ideoplasm itself can seep out into the world – and how the world's can seep back. We must understand the effects of our arcana, whether aetherial, natural, or mythic on the context of existence. We must understand the influence of Principal Conceptualizations, the Daedra Princes and their ilk, upon mind and will and vision and action. And when we have understood, to some extent, all of that, then we may begin to truly understand soils. For in soils are the entanglements of all the rest of the world. To study soil is to study all existence."

The echoes of ringing ratchets rang in the silence of his pause; the goblins, sealing up the emptied caskets below. His mouth worked, moistening lips and gums.

"I'm someone who loves to learn, Jon," he went on. "I delight in all the complexities of the world. I could not be otherwise and truly be dedicated to ambericity. I love the world, and I love to explore its mysteries. But even more than that, I love to create them. I love to expand the world's complexity… which is merely a restatement of my dedication, in truth: I am given over to the entanglement of existence. There is nothing more relevant to that dedication than the soil. There is nothing in all existence that can teach me as much, grant as much, help me as much, as can soil. And that, Jon, is why I do what I do."

"Wow," Jon managed lamely after a long, tongue-tangled moment. "I had no idea the subject was so complex."

The mer chuckled deeply. "You still don't, Jon," he said. "You have to really get your hands into it yourself to get a feel for the magnitude of its intricacy."

The human hesitated, staring down at the backs of his hairy hands. "Would that be possible?" he asked with slightly stilted uncertainty.

"Of course it is possible, Ambassador Urfe. It is that for which you have come, is it not?" Velvet smooth, that gilded mouth.

Jon grinned embarrassedly, looking down and shaking his head. "It is, it is, you're right. I just… well, I have not been pursuing that goal with much exertion up to this point."

Tsirelsyn's heterochromic eyes crinkled softly down onto Jon's hesitance. He smiled. And then, in the glow of Alinor's amber dawn, the hairless golden bear-paw of the first soil-sorcerer rose up and settled warmly, easily, comfortably down on the back of a human's hairy little neck, enveloping and oversized as parent to child, and its callused golden fingers massaged Jon's over-taut muscles. And Jon's eye slid shut under its blanketing comfort, its sentient contact, its simple entanglement, and his heart sighed in his chest.

"Be easy, Jon," he said softly. "All you have done has been necessary. Take comfort in that. And it has brought you here, here to your ready curiousity. Take comfort." His fingers squeezed Jon's neck once more, and then his huge hand patted its way down his arm, and the mer stepped back and spoke more briskly. "I had actually wanted to speak with you for just this reason, Jon. The memo the Thalmor sent with your arrival had many things to say – not a few less than complimentary to you and I both – but one of the more interesting things it had to say was that you came expecting to learn our craft. I've intended to extend an invitation to you to do some studying under one or more of us, but – well, you've been occupied, and I've been occupied. It's always a busy time, in the Kemendelia. But here you are, and here I am, so – would you like to learn a measure of edaphomancy? I would be happy to teach you myself, as would the rest of my people, I'm sure. What do you say?"

"I – well – well, yes, yes, I would love to," Jon stumbled. "It becomes more and more fascinating the more of it I learn. But –" He broke off. His stomach fluttered uncomfortably.

"A problem? What is it?"

"Well – " The human hesitated again. To speak, or not to speak? Racial betrayal, or common decency? Tsirelsyn's hand rose once more to rub Jon's arm soothingly through his robe; a natural, easy touch. That was enough.

"It's just that, well – the reason we were sent here to Alinor was to steal your people's arcane secrets," Jon burst out past his better judgement. "That's why _I'm _here. I'm supposed to steal your knowledge so I can take it back to Cyrodiil for the good of the Empire. I was supposed to spy on you. And that's the truth."

For a long moment Tsirelsyn stared down at Jon without expression. The human's heart filled with shame and anger, and he looked away, blinking back tears; he had failed both Tsirelsyn and his people; he would be sent away. But he looked up again anyway, eye burning, ready to face his sentence – and found that ancient face creased and rippled round a broad, fond smile.

"It is very big of you to tell me that, Jon," he said quietly. "But as it happens, I already knew. That, too, was part of the Thalmor's message."

Jon's jaw dropped. "What?" he gasped. "The Thalmor _know_? They _know? _But – how? And _why? _Why let us come here if they knew?" His eye stabbed a shocked stare up at the elf.

"I assume that they have always known," Tsirelsyn answered. "To be honest, Jon, your goal here has probably been intentionally exploited by the Thalmor. They baited your College with knowledge and power, just to get your people in Alinor."

"But – but – the School!"

Tsirelsyn shook his head. "The School had little to do with it, I fear. Of course I am not a member of that institution and so cannot speak for their internal workings, but as I know they usually do not collaborate with other institutions as a whole. Individual members engage with those outside their fold, but the School as an entity really does very little. I would not be surprised if the Thalmor has not even informed them of their bargain with your College."

"Why am I here, then?" Jon's mouth worked almost by reflex; his mind was still frozen in shock. "What do the Thalmor want with us?"

A shadow curtained close behind Tsirelsyn's eyes, at that; his mouth firmed almost to grimness. "Ah," he breathed, and sighed. "Ah. Well, Jon, understand that I am quite possibly the last mer in these islands with whom the Thalmor would want to share their intentions. I am something of a nemesis to them, though I do not return the estimation. I am the traitor they cannot touch. So I do not know their intentions, exactly. What I do know, though, is that the Thalmor are proponents of freedom. And there is no race more versed in that art than humanity. Perhaps that is why they have brought you here."

"Freedom?" Jon repeated, frowning. "But that makes no sense. The elves – sorry, the Thalmor – wish to destroy us, not free us."

"Give it a few weeks of study and thought, Jon, and you will see how the Thalmor seek freedom, and how your presence here assists that goal," Tsirelsyn said gravely, patting the human's arm. "I will say no more. For now, I think you should continue just as you would had you not known of the Thalmor's duplicity. Pry, spy, snoop, eavesdrop, study; do what you must to fulfill your College's objective here in Alinor. It would be ill-advised to allow the Thalmor to suspect that you are savvy to their tricks by behaving otherwise."

Jon started. "Er – spy?" he repeated, uncertain that he had really heard correctly. "Eavesdrop?"

"Of course," the old elf replied, unfazed. "That is what you were intending to do here, is it not?"

"Well, yes," Jon answered uncomfortably. "But – Tsirelsyn, I don't want to do that to you anymore. I would feel slimy. And aren't you at all upset that I'm here to steal your secrets?"

The elf threw back his head in a spray of interwoven foam-bright braids and let out a deep belly laugh.

"Why in all the worlds would I be upset, Jon?" he said when he had done. "After I have just spent the last hour or more sharing with you my craft? It is no secret, I say. I would like nothing better than that everyone on all the worlds should become familiar with edaphomancy. I would be delighted to teach you, freely, and beyond delighted to see that teaching finally come home to the oxisols of Cyrodiil. This is no esotera, Jon. I am no advocate of merrish supremacy. So do what the Thalmor and your College expect! Eavesdrop! Spy! Steal! I care not. I give of all our knowledge freely unto you, as you would. There is no shame in acceptance, whatever form that must take. I would not have you troubled by your superiors just for having been polite to me and mine."

"My superiors will not care how I obtain my information," Jon answered, shaking his head. "It matters not to them whether I gather my knowledge through guile or through open inquiry. I truly would prefer not to use guile, with one who has been so forthcoming and free with me." His eyebrows were stuck in an astonished arch.

"_I _would prefer it, though," Tsirelsyn replied swiftly. Jon's brow twisted even further. "Of course I will openly teach you of our craft, but I think it would also be prudent on your part to employ whatever circumspect information acquisition techniques you possess."

Jon blinked. "You're asking me to spy on you."

"Yes. I am."

"Why?"

Tsirelsyn's mouth firmed once more. "Your superiors may not care for anything save results, Jon," he said, "but the Thalmor does. They will not want you to have realized their part in your College's presence here. They have their ways to monitor what goes on here, and they may take it ill if they find you behaving otherwise than they would expect."

"I see," Jon replied after a moment of thought. "Well. That is most… unsettling. I will be guided by you, then. Though it turns my stomach to think of such duplicity employed on those such as yourself."

"Do not be sickened," Tsirelsyn said with a smile. "For it is not duplicity! You have my full blessing for whatever it may be that you must do." He smiled fondly down at the human, a vast figure silhouetted against the rising sun, firm-jawed face uplit by the flicker of the ward-wire and by the glow of the glass beneath their feet. He went on. "I take it you accept my offer, then? I would truly be delighted to have you as a student, Jon."

Jon blushed, and shook his head in a mute denial of his virtues. "Of course, Tsirelsyn. I would love to study under you." The two shared one of those magnetized looks that come now and then between people capable of true openness; uninterrupted interface. Tsirelsyn's black-gold eyes, heavy-lidded and crinkled to dark slits, seemed to fill Jon's one-sided vision to the exclusion of all else… all else save the recursion of the daughter's in overlay; so wide, so distant, so beautiful.

"Excellent to hear!" the father exclaimed, shattering the building fixation in Jon's mind. "Oh, but I should say: we – my daughter and I – will be leaving Arbasdiil in just a few days for a short summer sabbatical at my manor in the north. We would be delighted to have you there as well, if you're not too attached to your quarters in the solum…?"

"Not at all!" Jon replied. Indeed, he could hardly have been less attached to his cramped, narrow rooms so deep beneath the horizon. And anyway, he would have had to be a fool to decline such an invitation from any Alinorian Altmer, much less from the master of all edaphomancy. "I am honored by the invitation. I would love to join you and your daughter at your manor."

"And we are honored by your acceptance," Tsirelsyn replied, smiling broadly. "Well, good and good. An excellent talk, this one. It is not often I am favored with the conversation of a son of Talos. We will see you in three days, Jon. We go by carriage; I will come and collect you when we are ready." He pushed away from the ward, straightening to his full height.

Jon nodded. "Excellent. Oh, but wait. What of my servant, Falif? Will he accompany us?"

"Do you find him to your liking?" the elf asked.

"Very much so," Jon answered with a vehement nod.

"Then he will of course accompany us," Tsirelsyn said with a smile. "Not a problem at all. Now, though, I think I really must get back to work. All the rest is done, it seems, so now it falls to we to undo our earlier efforts." He gestured out over the field below, which was indeed empty of goblins, equipment and protective matting, and no longer either bare or black but green; the green of dried kelp straw covering the layer of humus spread atop the bared soil. At the delineation of the cleared segment of the white-walled terrace stood a figure in tight robes, golden in the sunlight, her ankle-length hair shining heart's warmth red. The glass pathway ahead looked ready to groan under the weight of the endeavor's hundred goblins all bustling and crowding and pushing around one another, preparing for the long trek back to the solum. "Until we meet again, Jon! All love live with thee!" And with a wave of his papa-bear paw and a soft twinkle of his black-gold eyes, the enormous Altmer bounded away along the shining bridge, long legs flashing prodigiously, scattering goblins before him like broken waves on the keel of a ship.

No tiptoes, for Tsirelsyn. No baby steps. The mer was much too large for that. Too large in body, too large in mind, and too large in heart. He had the unfading resilience that arises, sometimes, in the most venerable individuals of men, elves, and beasts. It arises from different springs; life's verve; stubborn, resentful incorruptibility; unquenchable fascination; unfinished business. And regardless of what the racial theorists and conceptual phylogenists might have told you, had they the chance, each of these springs wells up in the hearts of all mortals, to some degree or another. Just one is enough to preserve an ancient's wit, vigor, and passion nearly unchanged right up until they drop dead in the middle of their ceaseless interface with the world. One is enough, even for a life as long as the Son's – but of course he had them all. He could not have been who he was and not expressed each. And in that fact itself is the true key to his longevity. Thus do we call him the Inmate of Enthusiasm.

And Jon? Well, Jon too left behind his tiptoes and baby steps, that dawn, as the Son did so many aeons before his birth. No more resentment; no more fear; no more hiding; but curiousity, acceptance, fascination, and love. His eye had refocused. In one brilliance-bursting sunrise he had learned more of his hosts, their craft, and the nature of the world than he had in all his months prior in Alinor. No baby step, oh no; a bound! A leap, back to himself.

Jon rose to greet the dawn. He climbed up through horizon and horizon to meet the sun and Son above its most recent grade. But you, my Assemblage – you, I have lied to. You did not rise. For you, there is no rise. There is only one direction for us, and it is not up. The only direction is down. You could not rise. You did not rise.

You fell.


	24. Chapter 23

**Chapter XXIII**

I have failed. I have failed so very, very badly. I have betrayed myself. I have betrayed my Love. I have betrayed my craft. I am, truly, the very baddest of the very bad. The very baddest of the very bad.

I came to Alinor overflowing with enthusiasm for the adventure of it, for the excitement of seeing this land so few men have seen through all time, for the unlimited possibility for new knowledge and learning. I came here as I came to every expedition before it: with an open mind, a cultural curiousity, and an unashamed academic rapacity. I came looking to steal Alinor's secrets, but I also came looking to embrace its people, however I might find them. I thought myself ready to face the infamous Altmer; I had met the cannibal cults of High Rock's remotest wildernesses, and been accepted by them; I had infiltrated the Suppurations of Peryite and emerged unscathed and non-judgemental; I had walked the paths of southern Valenwood, and found friends among the arboriphiles. What was Alinor to me? I had seen a hundred other strange lands. What were the Altmer to me? I had embraced fifty cultures just as obtuse and unfriendly. I thought I was ready to be the first man welcome freely in the Aldmeri Dominion for his own personal mer. Clearly, I was wrong.

But I maintain that I did not start out here with the wrong attitude. I came ready to accept whatever measures with which the elves would attempt to put me off. But something changed. I failed. I lost tolerance. I stopped embracing the strangenesses of the culture, and rejected what I saw as their vile racism and unreasoning disagreeability. I lost sight of my goal. I stopped seeking understanding. I condemned the Kemendelia and its sweetheart master for nothing more than having been the victims upon whom the Thalmor chose to foist me. I hid away in their stronghold, living on their charity, and met all their advances of kindness with coldness and impolity. I abused Falif to make my own misery seem less. I failed. In every way, I failed.

And there is only one reason for my failure: I was too weak. That Alinor hated me, humiliated me, ignored me does not matter; that my companions resented the elves and ridiculed my attempts at understanding does not matter; that Odfrin, my definition of love, scorned them as well does not matter. I should have been strong enough in myself to maintain my stance. I was not. I let myself speak before I thought; I ranted on foundations of quicksand; I put forth postulations that served only to salve my own jealousies and resentments. I failed. I failed so horribly.

I do not deserve a second chance. I do not deserve reconsideration. I deserve all the hate, ridicule, and shunning ignorance the Altmer can muster. And yet, somehow, I have received the opposite. I have been befriended by one I wrote off in my own mind as little more than a beast, and have found an unprecedented key to knowledge among the lesser of the boons of his comradery. And I have been embraced, wholeheartedly, by the mer I berated with all my might first thing upon my arrival in his realm. I treated Tsirelsyn like the lowest, meanest, most unintelligent cur as I possibly could. I treated the master of soil like dirt. And yet, the next time I see him, he pours out his knowledge to me without reserve, invites me to his personal manor, and nearly embraces me to boot. Clearly, however unfriendly the character of Alinor-urban may be, Tsirelsyn and his ilk are the furthest thing from the stereotypical elven arrogance and racial resentment.

Gods, but what a fascinating mer that one is. Ancient as the earth beneath my feet, but he hardly looks it, and he certainly doesn't act it. So obviously, incredibly intelligent and curious; all those fields of study! It boggles the mind to think that he could have really mastered them all, but his elven lifespan makes it completely feasible. And fascinating, what he had to say about soil. Ambericity! Mother of gods, _ambericity! _The mer gave a name two thousand years ago to a force I thought to have discovered only ten past! He showed me the truth of my own profession! He showed me the fullness of the tenets to which I had only begun to lay flesh. He struck all my knowledge and understanding to dust, and made me excite and delight in the act. He is an intellectual of unparalleled skill, and a sorcerer of unprecedented subtlety.

But what's really surprising about him is that none of that is what actually drew me to him. It wasn't his skill, or his knowledge, or his intellect that made me feel as though I could leave my soul safely in his huge golden hands. It was his eyes. It was the way he looked at me. He jumped up those stairs, sprang out onto the bridge, hurried up to me, looked down into my eye with those beautiful, black-gold doe eyes of his – and I could just tell that I was really _there. _I was _real. _He saw me. He saw me, and he _wanted _to see me. He genuinely wanted to be there with me, to see me there, to hear about how I was, what I had seen in my life, what I thought of the world, to answer all the questions I could possibly have. There was so much focus, so much attention in his eyes. I have seen the shadow of that expression in others, at times; in new mothers, in priests, in children, in dogs, in Odfrin; but never had I seen it so full, so focused, so powerful. He could win anyone's heart in an instant with that look. He certainly won mine.

It was so surprising. I couldn't handle the shock; I failed again, and retreated ever so slightly into my shell of reserve, when what I should have done was respond in kind, interface to interface, interest to interest, warmth to warmth. I did not, but there is nothing to say that I cannot. I have failed, and horribly, but the Son's incredible forgiveness has offered me a second opportunity. I do not mean to waste it. I will embrace my place here, from now on. I should have done so from the start. My resentment only shames the faith Odfrin placed in me upon my departure. Well, and it shames me independently of that, too, of course.

That day. So much beauty, so much ease, so much comfort, so much sorrow. Warmth of womb shattered by the harsh briskness of Aatheril single gleaming tooth and – why does this keep happening? Look to the wonders of the future, Jon, not to the tragedies of the past! But I cannot help it; these memories rise up around me, tentacles from the deeps, images stored in amber, and I cannot suppress them, and I cannot separate them from the ideoplasm etching this entry. Why should these memories haunt me so? In my failure they were a comfort to my weak nature, but now? Now all shines bright before me! Now my feet are placed on the path of gentleness! So why, _why, _should I see her sorrow-screwed face so vividly, why should the Thalmor's pin-panther spectre raise its tooth winking grin in my mind, why should the past tangle me so tigh –

Ah. Ah, I see. Of course. _Use _what you have learned this day, Jon. This feeling is nothing more than ambericity in action. The memory of intimacy, the Sweetheart called it. Aye, that it certainly is. Apply the concept, Jon, and understand that the wonder of entanglement you enjoyed in Alinor-urban, in Odfrin's soft arms, is not gone and has never been gone. I am only superficially sundered from that time; the wonder of ambericity binds me to it, even now. So fully was I wrapped up in love that that time itself has become entangled with my life, and pulls me in on itself even now. Ah, but soil-sorcery's wonders ever dazzle. And why resist this? To resist is to refuse ambericity, and to fail my craft once again. So come, memory, in all your terrible vividity. I twine you about my breast.

That was the first time I saw rain in Alinor. The skies growled down at us; low rolls of thunder grumbling like the belly of a vast beast. Fog filled our Embassy's narrow chasm-alley, obscuring both its ends, and the sliver of sky high above hunkered, an underbelly of grey chitin. Lightning flickered constantly along the wet walls, trembling along the mirror-slabs of the city's spires into every quarter. The air huffed humid and thick with mist; the beast's panting breaths.

The novelty of it drew us out of our ochre-crystal shell. The stoop was steep-stepped and narrow, but it had an overhang – like a beaver's overbite, jutting from the wall – and enough space for all of us if we shared chairs, and so we dragged our seats out from the Embassy's central chamber to watch the water stippling the street. Well, okay; so Odfrin levitated the two of us out on our divan, but the others dragged out their chairs and it amounts to the same thing anyway. There we were, lined up in our inside-seats on the wedge of our stoop, sitting high and dry and happily idle like the ignorant middle-class misfits of the city that we were; Ildonis at the back by the door, in his Bretonesque throne with a frayed, faded quilt drawn up to his fat chin and tucked in around his bulk, pinning his arms to his sides; Odfrin and I sunk deep in our divan next to him, tied up in each other's arms; Alusan and Tsabhi laying low on their settee in front of us, spoon-snuggled; and the slumping papasan in front, where Ciene's slim spine curved close on Miles, her nose nestled near his neck. The endless patter of water on the cracked grey flagstones of our dilapidated street laid a soft white cushion beneath Ildonis' deep voice.

"You know," he mused, readjusting his blanket, "this is really quite dreary. Trust the elves to ruin everything, of course, but I didn't really think that even their _rain _would be this dismal."

I clucked my tongue. "Oh, it's not that bad, old fellow," I said. "Look on the bright side."

"_What _bright side?" Ciene riposted, craning her little neck back over the edge of the purple cushion to stare at me with those wide, upside-down eyes. "It's all grey. No sides to it."

"That's what I'm saying," Ildonis agreed, his voice answering in kind the groaning rumble of thunder above. "In Cyrodiil there's a _color _to rain. Lots of colors. Everything becomes more vivid; the flowers, the fields, the buildings, the lake, like the rain is full up with some vital essence. Here it's like the water is dead; everything it touches just becomes less real."

"Mm hmm," Ciene agreed with a nod, head still bent backward over the edge of her chair. "Exactly. In High Rock the trees come vividly alive with emerald when it rains."

"Algal bloom," Miles put in absentmindedly.

"But here I think they might just shrivel up and die completely," the Breton finished.

"Come now, you two," I remonstrated, shaking my head and laughing silently. "It's just rain. It can't really be different here than it is in Cyrodiil. You're just taking every opportunity to malign Alinor."

"Actually, this is false," a purring voice spoke up suddenly; Tsabhi, from her spot nestled against Alusan's loose-linened chest. "The rain here, it may be different than in Cyrodiil. It is quite easy."

"Oh?" I said, surprised. "How so?"

"It is different place, no?" Tsabhi answered lazily, thumping her tail rhythmically against the settee. "To be considered from a cosmological perspective. Different place, different relationship to the stars, the planets, and the constellations; different effect of aetherial flow. Atmospheric events, they are well known to be influenced by the composition of light-stuff flowing down through the sun and stars, as well as by the responsive aura of the ground. Here, the elevation is different so we must consider that, the groundcover is different so we must consider that, the incident angle is different so we must consider that, and the island is mostly surrounded by sea, not forest, so we must consider that. Altogether the result could be very, very different from the rains as they are in the mainland."

I could only nod dumbly for a moment, shown without a doubt the ignorance of my statement. Eventually I found my tongue and made it admit as much.

"Well, my apologies, Tsabhi," I said. "Consider me educated as to the extent of my own ignorance." Ciene grinned widely back at me, her tongue between her teeth, and then flipped her short-haired head up to nuzzle close to Miles' softly snoring read mop once more.

"I think what Jon meant was that it's not really that bad because we're all here together," Odfrin said, stirring at my side. "Because, really, what can a little rain do to _us, _even if it is elven rain?"

"Now that is well said," Ildonis exclaimed approvingly. "What, indeed?"

I shook my head silently, eyes closed, in amused acceptance that, no, I still would not be winning that fight. Let me say that something was not so bad about Alinor, and oh no no no, Ciene and Ildonis and the rest were all over it, but let Odfrin say the same with an anti-mer spin, and oh yes yes yes, _that _was very well said. I was accustomed to it, by that time, but it still made me shake my head.

"Was I wrong, Jon?" Odfrin's soft voice, for me alone, brought me out from my reverie. She blinked up at me, pale eyes slightly worried.

"No, no, not at all," I reassured quietly, squeezing her shoulders. "I am simply marveling over your considerable skill of presentation and the comparative laughability of my own attempts. An embarrassing comparison. I always seem to make a fool of myself somehow, when I open my mouth. Better that I should keep it closed entirely."

"Oh, don't say that, silly," she answered, tugging on my stubbled chin and sending a wry smirk across my lips. "How am I supposed to learn about you if you go silent?"

I shrugged. "Cut me open and read it on my intestines, I guess."

Her mouth fell open into a little 'o' of horror as my mouth curled up at its corners. "Oh, you!" she said, slapping my cheek lightly. "Macabre makes me yeck, you know. Do you want me to yeck?"

"Of course not," I replied. "That would be messy. But don't my embarrassing misphrasings, faux pas, and shoddy reasonings make you yeck more, in the long term? It's all a matter of relativity, my dear. Consider whether you wouldn't really rather have it all done at once –" She interrupted me with her mouth.

"You," she said when she let me go, cross-eyed and pole-axed by her tongue, "are far too hard on yourself. And you never make me want to yeck, and you know it. There's nothing wrong with the way you talk, Jon. You're just... very open about it, mostly, with us. And it comes across as naivety and inexperience, just because you're too humble to show us all the reasoning and purpose behind the things you say." She dimpled her cheeks up at me, rubbing the back of my neck through my hair. "But it's sweet, really. I like it. Don't change."

I laid my forehead on hers, chuckling quietly under my breath. "You are flattering again, madame," I said softly. "You know you really shouldn't. I'm actually quite arrogant, not humble. My head might burst like a pimple if you keep on with your inflating."

"Over that? Methinks you must be over-sensitized."

"Quite. I'm super-sensitive to everything you –"

"Mother of gods, _must _we have the lovers' whisper barrage at work even out here?" Ildonis' voice boomed suddenly out over us. "I swear, ever since you people paired off and started this game of Bedroom Bustle there's not been a single hour of us all together that hasn't degenerated into The Three Sibilance Committees and their Snoring Snoozeball."

Alusan snorted in laughter. He propped himself up on an elbow to look back at the enormous Imperial, grinning broadly.

"Jealous, man?" he said jestingly. "You could always get Ciene to conjure you up one of the Mazken, you know, if you need a little company at night."

An alarmed, chocking hack burst up from the cushions at the stoop's point, and the Breton's tousled head popped up from where she and Miles had sunk into the center of their seat.

"Umm, what?" she said, staring about bewilderedly.

Ildonis paid no attention, tapping his chin in thought. "Yes, yes, it's an idea, Alusan. Perhaps not one of the Mazken, though. You can summon ogrim too, can't you Ciene?"

The little woman's grey eyes widened to near circular. "_Yes _I can conjure an ogrim and _no _I'm not going to get you one for your bed! Or any other daedra! That's sick!"

"Oh, I don't know, really. It's a time-honored tradition in our craft. Lonely mage, can't groom himself, can't talk about anything except magic, can't see a girl without tripping over his robes, but definitely _can _conjure and command daedra. All night long. It's understandable, really; anyone would do it." His mouth twitched, as though suppressing a smile.

Ciene did not notice. Her brow contorted in disbelieving consternation, and she shook her head violently. "They're _demons,_" she said. "You don't do the dirty with _demons._"

Ildonis smiled lopsidedly. "Not much up on history, are you dear? Go check out the Mages Guild annuals from 3E 365-370 or so, when we get back to the College. _That _was quite a time."

The Breton just shook her head once more, and let Miles' rising, wandering hand draw her back down to their sunken nest.

"Ah, well," the big man sighed as he adjusted his blanket. "Alusan, you do that sort of thing too, right?" The Redguard nodded, his teeth bright between his dark lips. "Excellent. Then you can do the summoning. Now, what kind of brew do you think would get an ogrim in the mood, hmm? My supplies are limited here, but I think I could whip together a tincture of amor in a pinch. Monkey glands and iguana scrotum, do you think? I've got a bit of horker oil too that might be use-" A loud retching sound from the papasan cut off the Imperial's smirking blather.

"Oh dear," he said, grin gone even broader. "Are you quite all right, Ciene?"

She gave no reply. After a moment, though, Miles' scruffy red head jerked into sight, looking irritably around.

"She's fine," he said grumpily. "She just threw up a little. In my mouth."

I thought the enormous Imperial would vomit himself, so forcefully did the laughter ejaculate from his throat. His eyes popped wide; his blond brows jumped high; his cheeks shone polished apple red; his plump mouth gaped in a huge grin. He looked quite exactly like a little babe, sat in its high seat and ecstatic with its mother's loving antics, and like the mother we could not help but to laugh with him. Well, Miles could, but even his irritation sang a little forced.

"Yes, yes, thank you very much for that," he said sourly. "You are oh so amusing."

"Oh no," Ildonis managed, his voice high and squeaky and bubble-broken with mirth, "oh no Miles, it is you that is funny. Oh gods, hee hee! Hee hee!"

The red-haired Imperial frowned flatly back at the big man for a moment, but then even he relented, permitting a small, grudging grin and shaking his head fondly. Beside him, Ciene's head peeped up, her cheeks brilliant pink and her eyes downcast.

She glanced sideways at Miles. "Sorry," she mumbled. "I'm um very weak stomum." He just smiled, wrapped his arm around her thin little shoulders, and kissed the top of her mussed head.

"Now, see?" I spoke up over Ildonis' continuing giggle fits. "It really _isn't _so bad. A little bit of distraction and you forget all about the rain. Nothing special about it at all."

"Who said anyone forgot about the rain?" Ciene parried, straight-faced, recovering a bit of her composure. "I was thinking about it the whole time. That was half the problem." We laughed, and I shook my head, winking at the mischievous little Breton's smirk. Her eyes sparkled momentarily, glittering grey, but she said nothing, and the patter of rain and the roll of thunder and the flicker of lightning ruled the conversation's lull.

That reign did not last long, though. Ildonis finally managed to shake himself out of his silent hacking sobs of laughter, and resumed the conversation a tad in delay.

"No, but really, you lot," he said, breathlessly, "I'm perfectly happy as odd-man out, especially since you all just seem to be having a dandy old time of it – an enkephalined household is a happy household, I always say; so rut it up, honey – don't use that, you hear me men? It's mine – but, good gods, when we're all out here together, watching the most dreary bloody storm I've ever seen, and you all are wrapped up pairwise, whispering… well. An Ildonis gets bored under those conditions, you know? And a bored Ildonis is a sleeping Ildonis. And a sleeping Ildonis in the rain is an ill Ildonis. And an ill Ildonis is a massive pain in your patooty."

Odfrin laughed against my chest. "Oh, you silly!" she said. "You're not going to get sick from sleeping out here!"

Ildonis turned to peer down his bulbous nose at her from his considerable height, drawn up as majestically as he possibly could manage given that he was cocooned in a fraying old blanket.

"Sink me," he said, "the lady's an apothecary! If I had known I had a companion in the craft here in Alinor I should have been bothering you long since with bench blather. I'm afraid I must differ with your professional opinion, however; air such as this? Damp with the rain whose unhealthy properties we have just been discussing? Perfect conditions for ague to fester if one lets one's defenses down with slumber. Should I fall asleep out here I daresay I would be dead by next Sundas."

Alusan snorted again. "Dead by next Sundas my ass," he chuckled. "A _hurricane _in this place couldn't do you in."

"Yes, yes, do not be so ridiculous, you silly boy you!" Odfrin went on with a delighted little smile to bely her words and the swat she gave the big man's blanket-covered arm. "We are wise on you! You are like one of those old gourds the Argonians use for alchemy; so suffused with magickal secretions from your work that no sickness would come within ten feet of you without fainting. You would outlive us all, whatever the plague."

Ildonis chuckled, grinning broadly and cocking his head in grudging admittance. "I would say you exaggerate the stereotype in my case," he said, "but, no, you really don't. What can I say? The stuff gets in your skin after a while."

"No, but really I am just meeting you tease for tease," Odfrin said with a fond, sobering smile. "You really don't exhibit much of the usual apothecary aroma. And, really, I do understand the feeling. We shouldn't just whisper apart and leave you to sit with no one to talk to. I'm sorry, Ildonis."

"Yes, yes," I put in, "it's bad form on our part. My apologies, good man." The others echoed us, although Ciene stuck out her tongue at the big man as she did so.

"I really wasn't looking for apologies, you know," Ildonis said, embarrassed. "It was just a way of starting a conversation. I really don't mind that much if you guys do your whisper thing. I do understand the feeling, you know. It's good to see you happy."

"No, no, we shouldn't do it so much when you're with us," Odfrin insisted. "We like you, Ildonis. We don't want to miss out on your company. Especially when you're always so amusing."

"Me?" the big Imperial gasped with mock incredulity. "Amusing? You wound me, dear lady. I am a most professional apothecary, not one of your loose-trousered thespian thaumaturges. I stock alchemical components, not jests."

I snorted. "We have the measure of your practice, apothecary, and there is no fooling us! Claim your professionalism all you like, if you must save face. But _we _know the truth."

Ildonis shook his head, smiling. "Ah, very well, very well. I admit it. I am not so concerned with professionalism, and I do appreciate a good laugh. Not that professionalism would particularly matter here, at any rate. Nor that here is a particularly good place for a laugh." He smirked slyly.

"Oh for gods' sake," I exclaimed compliantly. "Are we back on that again?"

Ildonis' boom of laughter echoed the thunder overhead. Odfrin poked my side, and shook her head against my chest. "I'm sorry, Jon," the big man said, "but you're just such an easy target."

I smiled up at him. "Don't mention it, big bud. I don't mind. Happy to provide a bounce-back for your entertainment ball." He winked down at me, rosy child's cheeks shining, and then settled deeper into his chair with a sigh, blinking comfortably out on the drizzle. Odfrin and I cuddled closer in the white-fuzzed quiet. She nuzzled her head beneath my chin, breath hot on my neck, and for a time we but sat, content, and watched the flicker of lightning leaping between the alley's mirrored walls through the hanging mist, the silver streaks of water threading the air, the flat roil of cloud and thunder in the narrow strip of sky high above. It was just as dreary as they claimed, I will admit, but yet there was a kind of comfort in sitting there, in the cool, wet air, in letting fog poke its fingers up our noses, down our throats, and in pushing them out again with the hot horse-huff thickness of our lungs, in feeling Odfrin solid against me and our shared seat's softness behind, in seeing my friends, my colleagues there with me and similarly comforted, in the contrast of chill and companionship. We were a single drop of humanity in a vast cloud of elves. All our cultural differences had been stripped away to nothing by the simple expedience of the Thamor's poor accommodations; we had no class architecture, no framework on which to hold, and so we had no class. In many ways I have found this a common occurrence; comradery is so much simpler for us when removed from the context of our own society and placed in that of one strange to all. The sons of farmers – like me – can befriend the sons of ridiculously wealthy merchants – like Ildonis; the daughters of High Rock aristocracy – like Ciene – can tryst without shame the sons of Nibenean mold masters – like Miles; the kittens of Elsweyr's scholar-sages – like Tsabhi – can mate with the sons of Redguard privateers – like Alusan. All our barriers disintegrate when separated from our normal social matrix and placed within another. We feel the other's pull, though we cannot understand its nature, and we unconsciously cease to maintain our own. It is a blessing of a phenomenon, I think. I have seen it in many expeditions, and it does wonders for morale – as it certainly did for us in Alinor. I just wonder, though – inevitably, return to the mother society restores the behaviors we cease to maintain on our own. Relationships that had been solid as stone and utterly intimate dissolve in an instant into distance and coldness. These things always have their ends. And I wonder whether all our comradery won't simply evaporate by degrees when we finally make the return journey. I hope not, but – well. These things always have their ends.

A quiet purr tumbled into the silence on the heels of a rumble overhead; Tsabhi, blinking sleepy-slit eyes back at Ildonis and Odfrin and I,

"You smooth-skins, you are very strange in many ways," she said, "but Tsabhi is very happy to have you here. Tsabhi is very happy to have everyone and all here together."

And the skies cracked like an egg over our heads; split in a jagged line down the length of the alley's apex and spilled a sheet of starlight crashing like water to the black-grey ground. Lightning sundered the sky, spraying the scent of sizzled sighs and wistful exhalations, roaring with the gate-booming blast of breath slammed by void; sundering seeded by sundering, air from air by power from power; the rub-wronged lash of cloud-clustered friction. My skin prickled all over with the power in the air; Odfrin's frizz puffed alarmedly out in floating curlicues; Tsabhi hissed as her tail puffed bottle-brush thick. Ciene's pale little heart-face glowed ghostly and eerie, haloed by her floating frill of short brown hair, shocked by the suddenness of the sound and the sight. The world had gone from grey to blue; the brilliance of the flash pulsing and flaring across the inside of my eye.

We stared about at one another, dumbstruck. Miles had this look on his face, like he wanted to laugh with the suddenness and shock of it, and I could feel the same impulse in me as well; the impulse to laugh, just at the very marvelousness of the thing. But I did not, and he did not. Something held us back. The charged emptiness of the air, or… something.

"Perhaps…" Ciene's voice broke timidly on my ringing ears. She trailed off, little throat swallowing convulsively. "We really shouldn't be out here," she went on. "We don't know what Alinor's storms are like. And we're all mages. It seems like we might be tempting… something."

"What would we be tempting?" Alusan asked, unsticking his teeth.

"The skies, dark one," the Khajiit answered. "Do not tempt the skies. Tsabhi is just telling you about something similar, mm? The weather, she is affected by the stars, the sun. The clouds, they soak up, they dampen with the light, they bank magicka. And when they are releasing it, as these here lightnings, take care for where it goes! For magic will seek out magic, and lightning cleave to the mage. Little kitten is right; we should not be out here. We tempt the skies."

"Or something," Ciene whispered in her wake. The Breton's shoulders shook with a sudden shiver. "Yes, do let's go in," she went on, clambering out of the deep-nested papasan and tugging on the sleeve of Miles' robe, "before more lightning comes. We can make some brew."

But as the rest of us followed her lead, climbing from our cuddles with groans and moans and reluctant sighs, stretching scrunched spines and pushing the furniture back into the Embassy's dim ochre vault, another rumble of thunder growled overhead; growing, foreboding; a beast warning its foe. And then the flash once more, as the beast snarled free its wet-glazed teeth, even brighter than before, and the bone-shaking bark just following, seizing us up by our throats with its shock, its flickering thrill, and a line of lightning zagged up the center of the alley, cleaving the scene in twain. We froze, all of us, muscles clenched with the air's void-vibration. The grey grit of the street smoked a long black streak of melted stone. And a sly shape slunk out from the alley end's hoary haze. Parallels prowled through the mist. Gloom lurched forward from its leopard lurk. The Thalmor slid oil-easy down the street.

The horses drew up before the sharp-angled stoop, unnaturally silent as I have only ever found the Thalmor's horses to be, their narrow hips and shoulders glittering with condensation and jutting black-wrapped bones like the wings of night things. The low, slit-slashed carriage trailed slowly to a stop as the black-clad, slant-hatted driver slouching atop reined lazily in. My hair strained to attention, and I traded wary looks with halo-headed Odfrin and white-lipped little Ciene. The stoop was still half-littered with our blankets and chairs; the divan rested lopsided half-way through the narrow splinter of the Embassy's door.

The hull of the carriage clicked open, like an unhinging jaw; yawned upward, and disgorged an elf's long, grey-robed body onto the steep steps; a dead, grey tongue. Aatheril's stretched his spine high and lean in his strip-stretched shroud, and grinned up at us with that lazy, lopsided look, that single flashing eyetooth. And then he did something very strange indeed. He threw back his angular head, flung his eagle's-beak peaked brow up to face the heavens; shook out his oiled braid like tail feathers, and _breathed. _He breathed in that lightning-licked air like a drunkard guzzling liquor, his golden nostrils flaring white and ridged, his thin chest heaving in on that chilled mist, oblivious to the sleet bead-streaking his taut golden skin. It was so unassumed, so natural, so uncaring, so unprecedented an insight into the inner self of Alinorian elves, the inner self of one of the _Thalmor, _that it took on an unwarranted horror in my mind. He seemed to be filtering sharp strength from the empty air; he seemed to be savoring the prospect of some terrible task. And of course he was.

His head eased slowly down; his eyes closed, his mouth a satisfied serpent-smirk.

"Excellent day, isn't it?" he hissed, eagle-gilt eyes gleaming up at us. "Do you not simply _adore _this weather, mannoids?"

We answered him only with stony stares. His grin widened, deepening the long crease in his right cheek.

"No?" he went on with silky softness. "But it is so suited to your people! Especially to yours, frigid eyes." Odfrin drew tight against my side as the elf's cold golden gaze settled on her. Her skin was snow in paleness and chill, and her ears had drawn her scalp tight across her skull; I could see their tips twitching with strain. "You northerners have a particular appreciation for the few bits of worthiness in this world. But like all men, you balk at extremes. You have not the courage to take up as your own the cause of a pure concept. You are weak." I frowned. He spoke with such frankness; it was not normal.

"Elf-boy is talking very bold and very much," growled Tsabhi. The sibilance of a hiss whispered under her words. "This one is thinking it should be careful."

Aatheril flicked an annoyed little glance up at the Khajiit. "Watch your tongue, little molly… lest you lose hold on your firmament once more." I know not the import of that, but it sent Tsabhi into fits. She stared for a moment, shocked, and then snarled loudly, snout twisted in hard ridges, long teeth bared viciously, and threw herself, claws first, down at the elf. Alusan caught her around the middle as she leapt, though, and pulled her, hissing and spitting and struggling to match the storm's own bestiality, back over the divan in the doorway and into the Embassy. The Thalmor watched, smirking in satisfaction.

"What do you want, Aatheril?" I snapped, staring down at him. Odfrin trembled under my arm.

The elf turned his cold eyes to me. "It is not what I want that truly matters here, Ambassador Urfe, but what – I say." The lazy trail of his gaze had lit at last on the bits of furniture still lying about the narrow stoop. One narrow, perfect eyebrow arched. "Have you been spectating the storm, mannoids? Outside? In your little inside chairs?" My mouth tightened. "How quaint of you. And how convenient. Truly, the Aurbis does align along our axis."

"I like not your tone, elf," Odfrin snapped suddenly, lashing out with swift harshness. "You speak too freely. Clam up your tongue like the rest of your scum and free us from the stink of your breath!" Her body jerked with the vehemence of each word.

"It is not I that pollutes this air, long-stander," the elf let out on a long, soft breath. "Your stench would pollute this whole sector if not for our protection." He slashed looks to either side of the stoop, where stood the two pillars of gelatinous crystal the Thalmor had filled to soak up our so-called 'stench.'

"What do you want, Aatheril?" I asked sharply. Odfrin quivered furiously against my side.

For a long moment he did not answer. He just watched me, single tooth gleaming in the flicker of distant lightning spasming along the alley's walls, his gilt-skin glimmering with clinging water, black braid dripping, oil slick. His eyes touched Odfrin, and my arm around her shoulders, and the sparkle in them at the sight sent a prickling chill up my spine.

"I am here," he said at last, stepping slowly up the steep, elf-apportioned steps, "with good news."

I suppressed a wary frown. "What good news?"

"The best news, for you," the elf said, attaining the stoop's point. He towered over us, lean and narrow-shouldered, his parallel-stripped robes dripping slowly onto the stone. Miles drew Ciene a little closer against him. "The very best."

"Out with it, elf," I grated through gritted teeth. "What news?"

Still he taunted us, sneering silently down, surveying our scattered seats, oozing his disgusting little looks across my closeness with Odfrin and Ciene's to Miles, flaring those narrow-angled nostrils and pulling deeply on the overcharged air. My fingers tightened on Odfrin's arm.

"The School of Thoughts and Calculations has identified a position of interest for one of you," he said at last, turning toward me and dripping cool arrogance down his nose alongside the cold rain. And so casually, so simply did he say it, as though it were nothing in the slightest unusual. As for us, though – our jaws dropped as one. Odfrin went very, very still against me, and I felt the skin of her shoulder stand up all over with goose prickles.

"The _School?_" Ciene gasped. "A position? You're lying."

"I am not," the elf replied easily. He blinked his lazy look down on the Breton, and it was like a giant looking down on a normal man; the little woman barely reached his belly. "It would be ridiculous to lie to a child. Even a half-blood abomination child."

Ciene's cheeks blanched. Her eyes narrowed to shining slits, and her lips tightened to a thin white line.

"I am not a child," she hissed.

"You are the very size of my daughter," Aatheril replied calmly, looking away dismissively. "She has endured this world for just eight years, thus far." Ciene hissed wordlessly, back stiff as an angry cat's, her frail arms popping with narrow muscles and tendons at her sides, the knuckles of her clenched fists stretched white. Miles rubbed her shoulder gingerly, a spark of alarmed surprise in his eyes.

"Say what you have to say and go away," he barked belligerently. "We don't have time for your elf arrogance and insults here. There is really a position?" His bushy scarlet eyebrows bunched tight and low over his glaring eyes.

"You are in Alinor, mannoid," Aatheril replied. "Here, there is time for everything. Have you really not yet sussed that out? But very well, very well. I have little enough desire to keep your company, whatever the day's merits. There is indeed a position. A position for _you, _Ambassador Urfe."

I blinked. The import of the mer's words did not make its impact, at first; Miles and Ciene's and Odfrin's shocked stares made no sense. Then it clicked, and it was as though someone had whalloped me in the gut with a stalactite of ice.

"For me?" I managed through my shock.

"Yes, for you," Aatheril drawled. "The School has located a position in which your ambassadorial and magical 'skills' would be well placed. They have arranged for you to take up a residency."

My mouth worked silently. I met Odfrin's wide eyes with my own… and nothing spoke in the touching. I could not fathom her thoughts, beyond shock.

"Where?" I choked out after a long moment.

"To the east – and north," he answered. "In the island's central valley. You will be stationed with a most… intriguing section of our society, and one I think you will find fascinating and well suited to your skills and interests. The installment is known as Arbasdiil, and is a center of activity for the agricultural sector."

"The agricultural – why? What benefit is that to a sorcerer?!" I demanded, brow lowering.

"A great benefit, I am sure," Aatheril answered with a pronounced sneer. "You will be stationed with the soil-sorcerers there. They are masters of edaphomancy, a school of… _magic _unique, as far as I am aware, to Alinor." One slim, spidery hand slipped inside his harsh-edged robes and withdrew a crisp, folded brochure. "Consult this, if you desire more details prior to your departure."

I took it numbly, holding it up before my eye but seeing nothing.

"Soil-sorcerers?" I said. "Edaphomancy? Why? Why such an appointment? Surely there are more relevant specializations to investigate."

The elf's narrow shoulders scrunched briefly. "I cannot speak for the School's decisions, I'm afraid," he said, with a look on his face like the bear in the mead. "I'm sure they had their reasons."

I could only nod dumbly. I stared down at the slim brochure in my hairy hands for a long, long moment. My heart beat brusque in my ears. Crinkles jagged across the paper as my fingers tightened. I could not turn down a chance to study something, anything for _real _in Alinor… but Odfrin. Her pale profile loomed large, eating half my sight. My skin tightened around my head, my fingers, like the casing of an overheated sausage.

I looked up into the elf's sneering, angular face. I licked my trembling lips. And I asked it.

"Could the position be expanded to include two?"

The crease in the elf's cheek deepened to a dark crescent furrow as his grin spread wider, and wider, those lips tensing, single eyetooth shining, stretching until the pink border of glistening gums breathed free. And he watched me – just me – with those jagged eyes. His nostrils flared, tasting the cold, wet air.

"No," he said, and the sound slipped from his tower-high lips like a zephyr from a mountaintop, swirling about his body and gathering strength and chill all the time until it was as bitter and fierce as a gale in high Skyrim. Or so it seemed. So it still seems.

"No," he repeated, "the designation provides for only one ambassador. The School has many departments, Ambassador Urfe. Your colleagues will be needed elsewhere." That single tooth flashed in the flare of lightning across the walls.

I stared at him. I stared with me head pounding, hot and heavy with hate for his smugness, his satisfaction, his enjoyment of our torment. I stared, and fear wrung my insides, drenching my spine in cold blood like water from a sponge. I stared, and my friends stared; Miles with his mouth agape like a fish; Alusan leaning in the doorway atop the divan, jaw clenched hard and sharp as ebony; Ildonis frowning dubiously down; Ciene blank and pale and utterly unreadable; a congress of fuzzy figures that suddenly seemed as removed from the foreground of my life as if I had not seen them in twenty years. I stared at that smug, sneering elf, but he was not what I saw. I saw Odfrin. Her visage swallowed my vision; that golden tangle, that pale skin, those huge icy eyes blinking heart-broken beauty up at me. And in that moment I hated all of elven kind for what they had done to her.

Aatheril snapped the surface of the moment's tension. "Do not forget to do your reading," he said, slimy as only an Altmeri accent can be, flicking a glance to the brochure crumpled in my fist. "You'll want to be informed, after all, when your departure comes. I'm sure you will find it interesting." Skin crinkled sharply on his temples with his grin. I could find no voice save the loud, bull-furious breaths jutting chill mist from my nostrils. He went on regardless. "Prepare quickly. You will be collected in the next few days, when the School has had time to prepare further itself. I will meet you here at that time. Until then…" He let his eyes trail lazily out to the dreary drizzling greyness of the day. "… enjoy the weather, Ambassador Urfe. Enjoy the weather." And with one last sneering grin swept round at us all, lingering longest on the woman still pressed and staring against my side, he left. He slid his way down the steps with the flash of polished black shoes, pulled open the jaw of his carriage, and vanished into its black maw. The driver's wrist gave a lazy flick, his lightning whip cracked a streak of sparks over the horses' stiff heads, and with a whirling, neighing curve, the carriage slunk off into the rain and the veiling mist.

For a long moment after the Thalmor had gone the scene hung suspended in the cold crush of the storm, silent and still. I could not speak. I stared blankly ahead, too shocked and cowardly to meet any of the eyes fixated upon me.

But Odfrin – ah, dear Odfrin – Odfrin saved me from the eventual necessity. She took my cheeks in her soft hands, soft as the sweetest dreams, and pulled my gaze down to hers. Thickness clogged my throat as I fell into her clear, tear-sheening blue eyes.

"You have to go," she whispered. The tips of her tiny fingers stroke the hair by my ears.

"I do not want to."

Her eyes searched my face for a long moment, hungrily, desperately. Then she shook her head.

"That is a lie," she said softly. There was no condemnation in her voice. "You do want to go. You want to learn. It is why you are here. You cannot be otherwise. You long to go out. But you also wish to stay."

"I wish to stay with _you, _Odfrin," I choked out brokenly, taking her above the elbows and pulling her closer. "I want to stay with you, Love." The steam of our breath mingled in the cold air.

"I know, Jon," she answered. Her fingers tangled tightly in my hair. "I know, my bull. But go you must."

"How – how can you say that so calmly?" I growled lowly, eye burning and blinking back hot tears, the words insensible and inevitable for all that. "Don't you want me – to stay with you?"

Those pale eyes melted sorrowfully under the intensity of my stare. "Of course, Jon. Of course I want you to stay with me. I love you. But Jon, separation is a part of love. We cannot always be together."

"Why?" I said, and the word came out a sob. I broke free from her eyes, staring down at my boots and watching my tears blacken the grey stone, and gods it was so easy to look away from her. She seemed so distant, so separate, so sundered from all that I was and would be. "Why can we not always be together? Separation is no part of love!" The words caught and clawed and clambered on each other out my throat.

"But it is, my bull," her soft voice said. "It is. Love needs – we need – we must have some separation, for our love to stay vital. It's not – not healthy to cling so close, always so close. This is not a healthy relationship, as the gods themselves have shown us. I love you. I want you. But this thing has happened, now, and so we must have a measure of separation, and you must go."

"How can you say that!" I shouted suddenly. My fists clenched about her arms, and I glared frantic fury down at her. "How can you just send me away so easily?! I love you, Odfrin! I never want to leave you! And you – you – you feel nothing for this! You tell me to leave as though it is nothing, when who can know what the future will bring, how long I will be gone, what will happen to us in the mean time!? How can we know that we will ever see each other again? And you – you – " I broke off, tearing away from her and choking back sobs.

"Oh, my bull," she gasped, and threw her arms around my torso, pressing her face into my chest. "Oh, oh my bull, my bull! It is not easy! It is not easy to see you go! I am searing with sorrow inside! It is not nothing for me to tell you you must go! It is agony! Agony! It is agony, but I can do it. I can do it, because I know that nothing can ever take away the beauty we have had together, no matter how much time goes by. Even if we never see each other again, we will always have those moments to connect us, and remind us of what was, and is, and will ever be." Her arms squeezed so tight about me my ribs creaked, and I cried convulsively into the tangle of her sweet-smelling hair.

She pulled back suddenly, seizing my face between her hands and staring fiercely up at me with eyes glittering like dew-dropping ice fields at dawn, like stars in winter. "And I can do it because I have absolute faith in you, Jon Urfe," she breathed across my lips. "I know you love me. I know you will always love me. I know you will always come for me. You hold all my faith, Jon. And that is why I can do it."

My throat clenched convulsively. "Odfrin!" I choked. "Odfrin! Oh, my Odfrin, my Love!"

Our mouths met; fierce, hard, frantic. I crushed her close against me; her hands on my neck pulled even tighter. We held on, and on, and on, stretching the kiss as far as it could go, hoping it would never end, hoping we would never part, hoping time would simply seal us up in stasis like that forevermore; our lips, our love, our aching hearts pulling out the moment longer, and longer, and longer, hoping to match end to end, reach full circle, weave a new infinity, synthesize a new cycle of nothing but us and our –

But of course it broke. As subsections of time always do. It snapped back on us with vengeful force, and we jerked suddenly away from each other. Odfrin stumbled backward a few steps, and for an instant I saw in her spine-shattered eyes and tear-streaked cheeks all the pain and sorrow and struggle she had claimed. She looked at me, and her mouth twisted down into a sob's ugly stretch. But then she checked herself, and stiffened her spine, and smoothed her features clear and calm – calm, save for the shining tears still leaking from her pink-rimmed eyes. The others huddled embarrassedly around us, eyes politely on the ground and cheeks aflame where they could be – except for Ciene, who stared blatantly between us, one to the other, huge grey eyes wide and empty and palely beautiful blue-veined face utterly blank.

"You have to go," she said quietly. Ildonis, Miles, and Alusan lifted their heads cautiously at the change in tone. "You have to take the position."

"I have to go," I echoed dully. "I have to take the position." _But I do not have to like it, _I added silently.

"Don't worry, Jon," Ciene's voice sang out suddenly, shrill and sharp. "We will take good care of her." Her face did not change as she spoke; her eyes were still the same; disturbingly blank and chillingly empty.

"Aye, that's for sure!" Ildonis boomed out with a hollow attempt at heartiness. "You know you can rely on us to see she's well cared for, Jon." I could not muster the will to mouth thanks for the gesture; I nodded up at the big man instead… but my eye was held fast by the empty intensity of the little Breton's stare.

"It's a noble thing you're doing," Alusan said seriously, pushing out of the doorframe and coming up to squeeze my shoulder bracingly. "You work for the College here, Jon, and the Empire, and the world. It is a very noble thing. Remember it."

I could only nod, silent. I swallowed past the thickness in my throat, and blinked furiously, and looked past the dark man's serious stare into Odfrin's shining eyes. He searched my face for a long moment as the others looked on in silence; our sergeant, surveying his first soldier and ascertaining his strength and readiness for the battle ahead. He was our sergeant, in truth. That is why Alusan was sent with us. For all his lazy manner and carefree adventurer's impulse, the Redguard was at heart more disciplined, focused, and dedicated to our goal than any of us. I do not know what he saw in me, that day. I doubt that it was what he wanted. Certainly he would not be satisfied if he saw me now. I don't know whether he was then – but if he was not, he kept it to himself. He clapped the side of my shoulder with his hard, pink palm, and grinned.

"Come," he said, inky eyes crinkling. "You are not parted from us yet, dear Urfe! What need for tears? Let us inside, and remind ourselves of merriment. A titch of brandy and brew are in order with the day, I think."

"They're in order with _my _day, let me tell you," Ildonis rumbled approvingly.

I mustered a watery smile. "That does sound good."

The Redguard squeezed my shoulder once more. "Of course it does, man! Of course it does. Now to work, you skeever spawn!" he barked with sudden cheer as he stepped back and turned away. "Get this hermit's heap of seats inside on the quick! Move it out!" And, grumbling goodheartedly against the spellsword's deckmasterly tone, they set to it; Ildonis' huge back bent to shove the divan full through the slit door; Miles rolled the round seat and cushion of his papasan in the big man's wake; Ciene followed with the base; and Alusan himself hoisted high the scarlet settee and stepped inside with a rogueish wink.

They left me alone with Odfrin there on the misty steps, curtained in rain and shrouded in lightning-licked steel, with the subtle, perceptive politeness of true friends. I met her shining eyes shyly, heart beating hard through the drum skin of my flesh. Her pale cheeks flared with rosy dawn, wet with dew.

I stepped closer, timid. Her halting breath puffed against my chest. We did not touch.

"I love you," I said.

A faint smile fluttered across her face. "I love you too, Jon."

It wasn't enough. Nothing could have been enough. But it was what we had.

I touched her hand, and pressed palm to palm. Our fingers twined together. And then we went, soft-stepped and shy, out of the dreary drizzle's storming brood, and in to the dim ochre womb of the Embassy, where waited hot black brew lanced with brandy and all the comforting companionship our friends could muster.

They did their best to help us forget. They did their very best. But it was not enough. For Alusan was wrong, when he said that I was not yet parted from them. He was wrong. Though Aatheril did not arrive to collect me for days afterward, though I was among them still, I was not with them. The cut had been made, and I was separated from the rest undeniably. And they knew it, whatever their merry manners purported, however gay they made those last few days, however sweet and soft and passionate Odfrin was. A gap lay between me and them, between Odfrin and me, and it did not matter how much time we spent together, how much we talked, how much we made love; the space remained, like a bubble of glassy void around my skin. I was no longer with them, and they knew it. I saw it in their eyes, in the little looks traded, in the subtextual stream I could suddenly no longer fathom; I heard it in the unconscious, hesitant flicker of their voices when I was near; I felt it in my bones, in my skin, in my empty eye like a raw wound reopened.

Ciene and Ildonis were right; there is something strange and deadly about Alinor's rain, something sharp in its smell, something biting in its touch, something extra shocking in its sky splitting streaks. That strange, empty, dead air of Alinor's rain followed us in on waves of tingling lightning, followed us in, and forced its chill-charged gap into our lives. It cloaked me in invisible mist, in the fog that vomited forth the Thalmor, in an intangible buffer of void. The smell of it haunted my nostrils, cold and wet and crisp, in those last few days before my departure, though of course the others noticed nothing. We were no longer breathing the same air. We tried, but our efforts were, in our own dignified, civilized way, but the scrabbling of rats at the pane of glass between two culture chambers, squeaking and squalling and flaying in panic but utterly unable to surpass the separation. Those days were but a mockery of what we had had together; as friends, as family, as lovers. They were nothing but torture.

They were exactly what Aatheril intended.


	25. Chapter 24

**Chapter XXIV**

"Up the wake, wizud! Up the wake! Isa timea _go, _wizud! Soilersum be stompinum down here wery soon! Up the wake!"

Thus did today's dawn greet me. It seems so long ago, somehow. Like a relic of a past life, resurfaced somehow in my mind. The change in my outlook on life predates today, of course, but the change in my circumstances, the altered surroundings, the new acquaintances today has brought me have all driven home the difference in me. This journey has laid a demarcation through time with such strength that I almost find it difficult to contemplate the rest of my life; there is no past now, only future. A different life, aye; and this morning the simultaneous death of the old and birth of the new, in the true sense of all dawn.

"Up the wake, wizud!" Falif had to repeat once more, pounding loudly on my door, for I was dead in my bed with slumber. "Son um Mother is come um up soon! Werily soon, and I'z musta to pack um up wizud's thingers! Up the wake! Up the wake!"

I rubbed my forehead, stretching my shoulders; the muffled pounds and shouts penetrated my thick head only slowly – but then I realized what the goblin was saying, and I rolled promptly off my rhombusoid bed and onto my bare feet, blinking my eye into alertness.

"I am up, Falif," I called as I tottered around the narrow room, the black hairs standing up on my shins and thighs in the cool air as I snatched up my razor. "I'm up, I'm up."

A pause in the racket. Then Falif's voice, almost surprised, "You'z up, wizud? Truth and fully?"

"Truth and fully," I coughed out on a chuckle as I stumbled over onto the low stool before the chamber's toilet stand. I dipped my fingers in the basin; tepid, but warm enough to shave in.

"Then let Falif in the side, you'z!" he shouted loudly, renewing his banging. "Falif isa need to packumup you'z thingers! Let I'z inside, wizud!"

"But – I'm not even dressed!" I called as I drew the silver blade of my razor along my jaw, watching closely in the toilet's round, crystal-edged mirror.

"What am I caring?" the goblin scoffed. "Work is to a be done when work is a to be done! Falif is a seizing undressered wizuds werily often and nuff. Is notta novel tea to me."

"Are you sure?" I yelled back distractedly, trying not to slice my chin.

"It's not um mare ijjeh prop the zul," the goblin shouted back in exasperation. "Just um hurry um up, wizud!"

"Fine, fine, I'm coming!" I answered, throwing down the razor with a clatter and bounding across the room. "You'd think it was a footrace," I muttered under my breath. I unlatched the door's heavy metal clasp and pushed the narrow splinter of wood outward. Falif barreled past me as soon as there was enough space between the door and the jamb for his squat, round-shouldered, bulbous-headed little body, nearly shoving me out of the way in his haste.

"What zim a thinkumup this is?" he muttered to himself as he went past. "What, I'z newer seen um masters inda and yew'd? Great grievings, wizud, do I'z looks like an inn of the scent to –" He broke off as he finally cast a hurried glance back at me, and froze in midstep.

"What?" I said defensively as I walked back to my stool to resume shaving. "I'z thought you were not inn of the scent."

"I'z _not _inn of the scent," Falif breathed, eyes wide and shocked, "but you'z… you'z notta looking like um Highnesses, wizud. You'z um not looking like um Highnesses _at all._"

I raised an eyebrow at him in the mirror. "That's because I'm not an elf, Falif. Men look different."

"I'z knowing that," the goblin said, eyes still popping, "but I'z wuzna expecting you'z to be having so… so much… so _wery _much… _fur._"

"Oh good gods," I exclaimed with a guffaw. "I'm not that hirsute, am I? I'm barely out of the ordinary, and nothing compared to a Nord. _Fur_, indeed."

"Falif's eyes stretched, if possible, even wider. "These Nordies... " he mumbled hesitantly, "they is hawing ewen more of her suit?"

I chuckled, and shook my head wryly as I scraped a path through the black bristles prickling my cheek. "Yes, Falif, they are even hairier."

The goblin stared at me silently for a long moment, blue eyes bright, and then looked down, shaking his head. "They um's must a be paws and tervly furrsome," he muttered.

I laughed again, and patted the little one's round shoulder as I stood and crossed the room to where my white linen dressing robe hung across the foot of the skewed bed. "Ah, poor Falif," I said, smiling, as I thrust my arms through the sleeves, "so sheltered and inn of the scent. Allow me to spare you the shock to your sensibilities that is my masculinity."

"It's a notta right," the goblin muttered as he stomped past me to begin removing the black byssus sheets from the bed. "Wizud's is notta supper posed to have _fur._"

"Actually, wizuds isn't supposed to just be skinned," I countered cheerfully, resuming my seat before the toilet stand. "At least not if they're male. _Actually, _Falif, it's normal for wizards to have _lots _of hair. It's normal for all _males _to have lots of hair. On the mainland, men who look like elves – with skin as smooth as girls, I mean, although not even our_ women _naturally look as smooth as your men – well, that kind of man has quite a lot of trouble. People think they're weak. No one wants a man to look like a girl, you know? It's not right. Or so they say on the mainland, anyway. The androgynous ideal is really a minority concept. Nothing wrong with it, of course, but most people on Tamriel have a different view of what a male should be."

The goblin shuddered, his thick shoulders shivering like boulders in the grip of a quake. "Ooh, mannoids," he whispered, "ooh, you mannoids is wery strange. Werily you'za be hawing you'z own manners and isms and eye dears, but _ooh!_ They is wery strange... _Furry_ _wizuds. _Wery strange. _Furry wizuds…" _He smeared off into a slur of unintelligible mutterings, shaking his head and blinking those wide eyes with deliberate force, as though to wipe the sight of my body from his mind. I just chuckled to myself and went on with my shave. Truly, I have the hair a man ought – thick and springy everywhere except my back – and perhaps more than most of the Nibenese – mother was from Balfiera, and her grandfather a Whiterun man; the Nord blood sprang back somewhat with the bolster of my father's line – but I would hardly describe myself as _furry. _I stand by what I told Falif this morning; my case of the hirsute is as nothing beside that of the Skyrim clans. Proper bears, they are. Ah, but there's no holding it against him; the poor blighter'd just never seen a man in his skin before today. The sight _would _be shocking, after a lifetime of girl-downy elves. No, I take his shock only with amusement, not offense. There is no sense in such.

And, truly, it _was _amusing. He kept darting little glances at me out of the broadened corners of his bright eyes as he stripped the bed, bundled the sheets, laid across the mattress the sheening black silk robes in which I had arrived to Arbasdiil, folded the rest of my things, oiled my leather boots, packed my possessions back into my portmanteau, and performed all the thousand other minute tasks only a servingman would know had been done. Every now and then he would give a little hopping start and a shudder, as though he had had another flash of my 'furrsome' body, and I could tell that he was struggling to connect the image of me dignified in my robes to that of me 'furrsome' in my smallclothes as belonging to the same person. I straightened up, smiling fondly as I fastened the silk strap of my eyepatch around my head, and patted his arm.

"Give it time," I said. "You'll get used to the idea."

He blinked up at me past his veil. "Oh, werily certain, wizud. Werily certain. I'z getting the used of any of the things. But this one… this oners a wery strange widget. Some times it takes from me."

I shook my head wryly, and patted his arm once more. "No matter, my friend, no matter. You will get there." I bent to snag the handle of my portmanteau from the floor. "Speaking of which," I went on as I straightened, "when _will _you get there? And how? To our destination, I mean; to this manor of the Son's. Are you to accompany us on the carriage?"

"Oh no, no," the goblin answered, a relieved note in his voice – no doubt to be back on more comfortable conversational ground. "I'z um notta be carried by horse slinger. I'z um be the follower in severed days. Musta be to finish up some um works here foremost."

I nodded my understanding. "Ah. Very well, then. I will look for you soon. And with hope, I will have much of learning to share when you arrive. Until then – farewell, my friend, and see the world through its soil."

The goblin's enormous palm enveloped my extended hand in satiny smoothness, bobbing up and down vigorously. His eyes crinkled up at me. "Werily, you'z is a becomn' um soiler Highness," he said. "I'z um hearing it in all of you'z words, and feelings it in um ewery touch; werily a soilers' um friendly like the ning. Fare to the well, wizud! Fare to the well, and see um worldlies in ta eart! Fare to the well! Fare to the well!"

And with a little shove of his huge hands he sent me scooting out of the doorway of that narrow, cramped little crevice of a room and into the amber glow of the soil-stone hallway. He shoved me out, and he waved me off; a squat little bulbous bowed figure gleaming brilliant white against the dimness of my room, crinkling and winking those oversized eyes and tilting his gloved palms slowly back and forth. I raised my portmanteau high, smiling broadly with fondness for the little fellow, for my unexpected friend, and then swung round and off, off up into the solum's twining corridors and the next life that time's skin had in store. I breathed deep and free of that musky soil-heavy air as I climbed the solum's amorphous ramps and stairs, conscious of the ending approaching but happy for it, smiling for it, glad to cut off that last part of my life and start fresh. Even then I could feel the change coming, the liminal barrier I was about to cross. It tugged at my heart, as it had been tugging at me for the last three months; the soil calling to my soul, longing to soothe. It tugged me out of my angst, my reclusion, my fear, and back into love with the world. And at last, it tugged me up to the doubled G, the Garden Grove, where its master awaited me with his soft smiles and softer eyes.

I grinned wide as I crossed the iron-grilled paths, slipping between the twisting trees and bobbing bushes toward the looming bear-shape, the broad-built shadow holding its naked paw to the blossom of a bottommost branch, casting its cloak ring shadow through the diffuse drippings of the amber net just above its hulking head. He was back in the same crisp, tawny, poly-pocketed robes as before – they seem to be standard issue in the Kemendelia, for I have seen them many times – and his web work of white braids gleamed softly across his back. Beyond him, tucked against the dark trunk of the tree, two slim figures leaned; Rumarene and Ilandra once more. The bare toes of all three peeped from beneath their hems; baby-fresh and butter-golden.

"Good morning, Jon."

The mer's deep voice rolled slowly out as I drew to a stop behind him, like the sweet purr of a sleepy cat. Ilandra, with her long, messy braid, beamed and waved at me as shorter Rumarene under her arm pressed her lips together cutely and nodded her warmth. Tsirelsyn turned, hands falling to his sides, and favored me with a twinkly-eyed smile.

"Good morning," I replied, grinning back and bowing briefly. "Good morning, indeed."

"You are ready, then?" the big mer asked, poking a look at the bag in my hand.

I nodded. "Yes, quite ready."

"Good. Then I think we may make our way up to the surface. All is being prepared there. Come." He patted my arm, and stepped past me on up the winding garden path. The two soil sorceresses followed in his wake, and I fell into step beside them as we wound our way through the diffuse-dim arboretum.

I quirked an eyebrow questioningly up at Ilandra. "I take it you are our sending-off committee, madames?" I flipped the look over to Rumarene's slick-haired head to open the question to both. Still, it was Ilandra who answered.

"Oh no, no," she said, shaking her fraying braid. "No, Ruma and I are going with you! We will be there for your first lessons, Jon. Arbasdiil will abide without us for a time."

"Ah," I said, bobbing my head. "I see. And what of – the daughter? Cehseekye?" My throat stuck on the question.

"Cehs is already above," Tsirelsyn's voice rumbled from the towering mer-shape ahead. "She has been overseeing the loading of our luggage, and the preparation of the horses and the carriage. She would not miss this journey, Jon."

A heat came into my cheeks at that – for what reason, I do not know – and I said no more. Rumarene smiled her precise smile encouragingly across at me.

We followed Tsirelsyn up through the solum, up all the interminable soil-stone stairs and across all the arching bridges and coil rampways spanning the gaping cavity. The Altmer strode along in silent ease, long haunches clenching and releasing beneath their tawny robes without effort, despite the length of the climb. I did my best to emulate their nonchalance, but I was not born a mountain man, well-used to a morning climb, nor a migrant herdsman of Hammerfell, to pace away every waking hour, and steps in Alinor are not cut to a custom comfortable for most men. Yes, there was the half-step strip run along the edge of each staircase for goblin access, but I have an unfortunate case of excessive pride, and I could not stomach the thought of giving in to my weakness and to the slave stairs; I huffed my way along, trying not to think about the fact that my knees near hit my chest with each step. I did keep pace, regardless, but I suspect that was only because my hosts slowed to match mine. Polite of them, and even more so that they did not make note of it. They are a savvy, conscientious folk, edaphomancers.

The solum hummed with activity as always; with the patter of slippered goblin feet, the off-key clamor of their bent-belled voices, the crawling glimmer of their white wrappings in the gloom; with the rattle of carts and clinking cases, the creak of yellow ropes twisting in the thick air, taut with crates and lashed barrels, the throbbing tones of the aerial anchored levitation enchantments, buzzing behind my ears and below my teeth. Such it has been every time I have seen it, save the first. I was very wrong, I think, when I claimed that the Kemendelia has but little work to oversee, only a few management decisions to make; their day to day laborers could not stay so busy if their management is as limited as I thought. A poor assumption, it was, and one – but, ah. I have done with self-censure. Move on, Jon.

We climbed, and my face pumped hotter, ripened ever more rubicund. In contrast, the walls of the solum's shaft grew dark and darker as we rose, passing from a light ochre, almost identical in hue to that of home, of the old earth of my father's farm, to a deep, pure black near the surface. I would not have noted it – I had passed those layers many times since my arrival in Arbasdiil and never seen anything of interest in them – save that Tsirelsyn drew my attention to them as we walked.

He lifted one long, broad-palmed hand above his head and trailed his callused fingers along the enchanted soil, lovingly gentle.

"You see the striation, Jon?" he said, looking back at me. "Layers of soil in various stages of development and character. Horizons, we call them – for they _were, _once, and in many ways they still are. I have known them all in their heyday, as they have known me. For others – younger people, like you three – their profiles serve as scrolls scribed directly by time. Much of all tenses can be read in them, if one knows how to see. That is why we have left them as they are, the same soils that were here when Arbasdiil was first built, the soils that have grown up around us; so that they may tell you their secrets. In other places, we have altered them, at these depths, altered and optimized as we have learned more and more of soil functioning – but these we leave." He patted the wall fondly.

"How – can you – read the past – or future – in them?" I panted out, stubbornly, refusing to set aside curiousity, whatever the circumstances.

"With your mind, Jon," Tsirelsyn answered, smiling back and me from an even more absurd height than usual, several steps ahead as he was, "with your mind, and your knowledge of soils. That is enough to say much. Then there is the memory of the soils themselves to be consulted – but that is something else entirely. We will discuss all of these matters in proper depth soon enough. You are my apprentice now, are you not?"

I grinned up at him, open-mouthed and panting, and nodded acknowledgement. Ah, but it is a measure of that elf – that amazing elf – that his response to the sight of a sweaty, hairy, smelly human confirming his mock-apprenticeship under only the _founder _of the craft and one of the oldest beings in all creation is not a sneer, or a scoff, or a cutting comment, but a fond smile and an encouraging pat on my bowed back. I do not know what twist of fate fooled the Thalmor into placing me with such a rare specimen of a mer, but I prostrate myself before whichever god was behind it, for such luck was utterly beyond hope.

We climbed the rest of the way in silence, save for my heavy breath, and stopped at last through the thick, seamless stone doors just below Arbasdiil's sealing dome and out under the grey pre-dawn skies. The roads netted far above were still dull and dark, their pylons glowing with soft, blue-white light like stars, laying that gentle mantle across the quiet solum-surface. Shadows fuzzed diffuse forms between the buildings, undisturbed as yet by goblin bustle. Falif had awoken me even earlier than I realized; work abided yet beneath the earth, and even the eastern mountains were only softly yawning in pink-tinged cloud-shrouds.

The doors clicked shut behind us, and I straightened up ever so slightly, breathing deep; Arbasdiil is done with me, for now, and my time there is done, and if I return it will not be as the same man, and it will not be to the same sorrows. New life lies ahead. So I thought to myself as I followed the massive net-braided mer on through the shell-walled compound.

He led us to one of the oversized stables that I had noticed before; between the two enormous metal gates latched back against the walls, and down a long, stone-floored gallery lined with tall wooden stalls from which echoed the stamping and huffing of sleeping horses and the swish of tails against the walls. The place was unlike any stable I had ever seen; immaculately clean, scrubbed, and without even the slightest scent of horse flesh or dung; they had been replaced by something entirely different. I could not believe it at first. I frowned, sniffing surreptitiously as we passed stall after stall. It could not be denied, though, and so I asked the question.

"Is that – alcohol?"

Ilandra glanced back at me over her slim shoulder, eyes bright with surprise. "Why yes, it is," she answered. "Why?"

"Well – it's a bit unusual, isn't it?" I replied awkwardly. "We – uh, well, we don't do that on the mainland."

"_Don't_ you?" she said, surprised.

I shook my head. "Not at all. Erm – well, why – how – why do you?"

"It eliminates a plethora of pathogens," helmet-haired Rumarene answered crisply from my side. "They have it on pipes. Release a brief wash of the stuff every now and then. The horses get a bit tipsy occasionally, as do the goblins, but it's effective enough of a disease deterrent that we do not worry overmuch."

I shook my head. "Wow. Just – wow." Alcohol. In. their. Pipes. I mean – wow.

"Is it _really _so strange?" asked Ilandra again, falling back to walk at my other side and blinking in disbelief. "It's just alcohol."

Tsirelsyn chuckled up ahead. "My apologies, Jon," he said without turning. "These two are my Youngest. They have not yet reached their studies of human culture. Perhaps you could educate them a bit?" He tossed an amused glance back at me.

"Yes, do," Ilandra insisted eagerly. "Why is it strange to you?"

"Because there are better uses for alcohol, I suppose," I began, still blinking back the boggle of their ignorance. "I mean, you do realize that people consume alcohol, right? Elves do that too, unless I'm very badly mistaken." The fray-braided elf nodded silent confirmation. "Well, I don't know how it is here, but everywhere else in the world people are too willing to buy alcohol for drinking for any producer to want to sell it for – something like this." I waved a hand round at the spirit-reeking stalls. "There'd just be no point in it."

"I see," the elf said, bobbing her head. "How odd. Of course we do drink liquor as well, but we don't see that as any reason not to use alcohol for other purposes as well. It adds some benefits to our operations, so we produce it."

"But couldn't you sell it instead and make a greater profit?" I asked curiously. Truly, I marvel that such a thought had not occurred to her immediately; the Altmeri trade traditions had seeded those of Cyrodiil long eons past – or so I assume. Perhaps I am wrong, though, for Tsirelsyn said,

"And here, Jon, it is you who has it to learn." He smiled kindly down at me. "But not now. For now, we have only the physical journey, not the mental. As much as the two can ever be distinguished, at least. Behold." And he turned the corner into the next branch of the enormous stables, swinging his arms wide, and I laid my eye on the vehicle, and all the effervescence of questions on the mer's comment fled my mind like star-bugs startled by thunder.

Spinter-spun tiger's eye, I thought at first of the square, bluff-faced carriage; glowing rich brown and gold and black in acute-angled facets with its own internal luster, gathering the scant grey light of the hush-breathed morning and rubbing it warmly together, like a farmer in winter's wee creak, to something solid and comforting. After a moment's beauty-struck awe, though, I realized that it was not stone at all, but rather lustrous, oiled wood, perfectly grained and stained, cut in thin strips and cobbled masterfully together in ray-blooming parquetry. Taller even than the gleaming horses hitched before it, it was a vehicle sized to its master; Tsirelsyn looked normal, leaning at its instrument-strummed side – and I, of course, was as small as a gnat. For all its beauty, though, its grandeur was simple; it was a plain thing, built sturdy and strong, with a long, wide bench across the front for the driver, a square passenger's box, and a long, low bed behind, loaded with cargo; it was functional for more than just whisking edaphomancers about. It is characteristic of the trade, I think, this practicality in design even for things built exclusively for pleasure. They seem to find it comforting to know that something _could _be useful, even if it never will.

"Ready up there?" Tsirelsyn called to the goblin hunched on the bench with his knees by his ears, picking idly at his slippers. He nearly fell off at the ring of the mer's deep voice, but caught himself with a jerk.

"Oh, dear um up of mine," the goblin answered wheezily, clutching his chest. "You'z um is streamly scarring me, Highness Son. Streamly scarring."

"Why, Germong, is that you?" Tsirelsyn replied brightly as he stepped up to the side of the carriage. "It is! Why, what a fellow! Are you to be our whip-wielder today?"

The goblin pushed his head down at the elf, meeting him eye to eye. "Ga to all wum, and this is Germong what's hasn't bean to be welcomed to thissear horse-beast trail cause to be um yearlings and dearlings for um grand-daddy son who'sa be handling all um drover jobs from nigh deck the aid, even though I'z werily the bestest awailable in all the twenty and four! No no, they'z saying to me, no no pappy, you'z is must to stay to the here-dark and teach um up chittlins. Let young Jibber-Jub do um Son's drover ring. Phaw to the chittlins, I'z saying. Little green lard balls, I'z saying. Phaw to um! Germong is for um whip-wielding and horsey-beasties, to help um Son round in towns, not for stool staplings! And ga ga, little Jibber-Jub's sprained his old wristy, so _now _they'z telling me, come um back um up, Germing-wiser, or um soilers will notta be to droven! And so now um up come here, and here to um drover um Son as of uldness, as bestly and only I'z can. And werily this um's streamly good." He finished with a firm, satisfied nod of his huge head, and straightened back to his hunching seat. His jaw shifted sourly from side to side, like a cow with its cud.

Tsirelsyn chuckled deeply, and smiled broadly up at the grumpy old goblin. "Ah, Germong, it is good to see you again in that seat. Many a goodly riding we'z had in um oldness days, didn't we?"

"Goodly ridings?" the goblin responded gruffly, jaw stilling in startlement. "Well, yes um, I'z suppositioning we'z did. Wery goodly ridings."

"At fly um up speeds," the mer added slyly.

The goblin's eyes brightened. "Ooh. Ooh and that we'z did, fly um up speeds all the cross of landings. Them're summered days like um birds." He mulled wistfully for a moment, eyes sparkling between his veils and the wrinkles of his green skin, and then he looked fondly down at Tsirelsyn, and stroked the mer's braided hair with his long, feeble old fingers. "Oh of mine – it is wery goodly to be back with you'n'I, innit Son?"

"Wery good in the deed," Tsirelsyn answered, eyes crinkling up at the little slave. "And may the hap but we'z will go round and fly um up speeds a bit to the day, too. But first, tell me: is everything loaded and locked?"

"Fly um up," Germong repeated, staring into the distance as his hands gathered the reins eagerly. "Ooh sweetnesses, fly um up. Ah." He gazed happily off for a moment more, then focused in on the elf waiting patiently below him.

"Ga, ga," he said. "Ga, every of the thing is load um up and lock um down. The caksets they are lashed, and um lead laden on the hands I'z saying, and um be locked and locketed tighter than um nut clasp, and um miss of stress is um waiting in the side, and blast the brow of me if there's any of the other things to reap the port. Except you'z, and _those." _He blinked pointedly down at Rumarene, Ilandra, and I where we stood a few feet off from the horses, trying to hold back our grins. "Are _those _to be load um up as well? They'z um to be wery diff in the cult to locket, I'z of warning. And what out of um worldlies is _thattun_?" He frowned fiercely down at me.

"Ga," Tsirelsyn answered with a grin as he stepped back from the carriage. "But um'll load 'em selves. Donna stir yonself." The goblin paid him no mind. He just muttered to himself and stared suspiciously at me. I suppose he had never seen a man before.

Tsirelsyn lowered his voice as he drew near to us. "Delightful fellow behind a team," he whispered down, "but a bit gone with the years. I'm going to check the horses before we go; Il, Ruma, if you would check the cargo…?"

"Yes, of course," Rumarene answered quietly, nodding.

"Then Jon, if you'll leave your bag with these two to strap on, you can find a seat." Tsirelsyn smiled at me, earnest-eyed.

"I couldn't possibly," I answered stoutly, to the double-taken shock of the two womer already setting off toward the low bed of the carriage. "I am no novice at travel, master elf. Let madame Rumarene and madame Ilandra take their ease; I will see to the cargo." What did he expect, that I would let two women – well, womer – lash down my luggage? I mean, really.

The elf blinked for a moment, nonplussed. Then he let out a booming laugh as great as his stature, and clapped me round the shoulders.

"Now here is a ripe example of a real mean!" he exclaimed (though I little felt the truth of his words, next to someone whose one hand was large enough to span both my shoulders). "Prime Colovian chivalry! I had not thought to find it in you, but yes, yes, there is a gelisol and an alfisol or two underneath all that morphisol, I see it now. By all means, Jon, do as you will. There is but little such gender-based discrimination among us, but I'm sure my Youngest will appreciate the leisure of yours. As you will!" He clapped me once more across the shoulders, and then spun on his bare heel and hurried back to the horses.

The two soil-sorceresses were staring at me with twin confusions, identical twists in their smooth elven foreheads, but I merely smiled, and bowed.

"Please, madames, assume your seats. Tsirelsyn and I will be with you briefly." I did not wait for a response, but hefted my portmanteau and strode briskly round to the back of the carriage's long bed, glowing, I must admit, with a bit of vain pride. It felt good, I suppose, to show them how _men _treated the female sex?

I swung my case up onto the gleaming, planked plane of the thick bed, and hoisted myself up after – with some difficulty, for the thing was _high; _only later did I discover the fold-out steps tucked underneath. The cargo – primarily the round-edged, white metal caskets the Kemendelia favored, interspersed here and there with polished blackwood trunks and brass-bound barrels – had been arranged in a single layer, piece to piece like a Khajiiti plate-puzzle, and then secured across the front and top with wide, ratcheted straps hooked into the walls of the bed. It was as secure a lashing as I have ever seen; there was barely a gap of wiggle-wander in any of it. Still, I checked the hooks and the fastenings just to be sure then shoved my portmanteau forcefully down into the gap beneath two abutting barrels. I leapt back down to the ground with a jolt to the heels and the knees, and hurried happily back around to the golden brown chatoyancy of the carriage's doors. I was nearly giddy with happiness; I was actually _doing _it! I was going to the manor of a soil sorcerer, and I was going as his _apprentice. _I was finally doing something worth doing. It was enough to make up for the fact that I had to jump to reach the first step up to the door, and that the thing was closer to a ladder for me than steps at all, and that the handle of the door, when I reached it, was at the level of my chest. And it was almost enough to make up for the fact that my feet dangled an inch in the air when I had settled myself on the sea-silken seat within. It might still have been enough for that, too, had Ilandra and Rumarene not taken the forward seat, and left me to lift myself up next to the silent, statuesque figure occupying half the other, with her legs crossed under her robes and those long toes pure and clean and golden on the floor, in the air. But no, I'm not sure that anything would have compensated me for having to lift myself up to the seat as she looked on with those unreadable eyes, cheek nestled in her smooth hand, silk-sheeted hair coiled over her shoulder and pooling across her foot. Mara knows that shouldn't have mattered any more than the other two, but, whatever the reason, it did; my cheeks burned as I settled back into my own corner. Luckily, the moment was broken almost immediately; Tsirelsyn stuck his head in at the door.

"All settled?" he said cheerily, looking around at us and smiling broadly. "Excellent. I'm just going to jump up here and ride with Germong, I think. Do some chit chatting, and make sure he doesn't drover us off the skyway. Enjoy the trip!"

He vanished with a cheerful little wink, and the gleaming door clicked shut in his wake. I traded amused looks with Ilandra and Rumarene.

"Your Tsirelsyn," I said, " he sure is some kind of gem. Very friendly. Very charming."

"Oh, yes, he certainly is," Ilandra replied with a proud little smirk. "He's our favorite. He's everyone's favorite."

"I can see why," I said. "He is very welcoming and accepting. He could befriend an ogre."

"No doubt!" the fray-braided womer replied, wrinkling her nose cutely. The carriage jostled slightly, of a sudden – from the big mer's climb up to the driver's seat, perhaps – and then Germong's rough old voice rang loudly out.

"Errrr um up there horsey-beasties! Hooooo – ah! Errrrrrr um up and stomp um out, we'z a head for the fly um up streaklings! Hooooo – ah!" And with the supple snap of a leather whip and a low whinny, the carriage eased into motion. We were off.

I settled back into the thinly padded byssus upholstery with a little smile, watching through the gap of the high window's thin black curtains as the stables pulled past us, and then the white, ruffled buildings of the solum surface. The horses' strangely clawed hooves quickened to a triplet clicked trot. We were off. I could not stop smiling.

"So, Jon, I am very curious," Ilandra's voice pealed sweetly out as we passed beneath the solum's southern gate and gained the incline of the pylon's glassy black ramp, rousing me from my happy reverie. "About this Colovian chivalry Tsiri mentioned, in particular. Are you Colovian? Perhaps _he _could see it in your profile, but all I can distinguish is the alfisols of western Cyrodiil and the morphisols of the southern jungle." Helmet-haired Rumarene raised one narrow eyebrow in shared interest. Next to me, Cehseekye merely watched, silent and stoic.

"I am not Colovian, actually," I answered. "My father was Nibenean through and through, and my mother a Breton from Jehanna. Her grandfather, though, was a Nord, and Nordic is the cultural root of Colovia. They had a strong relationship; he shaped most of her views on life. Colovian chivalry is a long tradition with many complex facets; one of the more prominent is consideration toward women. I'm not truly well-versed in the tradition, but between my mother, my Colovian associates, and my travels in Skyrim it's not surprising that Tsiri thought of it when I volunteered to spare you the effort of manual labor."

"I see," the womer answered after a brief pause. Her eyes shone brightly; vivacious and sincere. "How fascinating. But what of the idea itself, though? Courtesy toward women, I mean. Why should there be any difference in the treatment of the genders?" She watched me eagerly.

I shrugged, almost nonplussed by the question. "Well, why shouldn't there be?" I replied. "The sexes are not the same, so it does not make sense to treat them as though they are. It's a simple physical fact that the female sex is weaker than the male, so we think that men should be the ones to carry out most of the manual labor. We are simply better suited to it."

The two womer across from me traded sidelong glances, then looked awkwardly back at me. Rumarene spoke after a hesitant pause.

"_Perhaps _that is true for the races of men," she said. "_Perhaps. _As for us, though, there is no significant physical difference between mer and womer. If anything, we would consider womer to be stronger and more constitutionally robust than mer, because we must be equipped to bear babes in our bodies for years at a time."

"Years?" I said curiously, slipping into the conversation's side track. "What years? As I have seen, most Altmer do not bear many babes; there is little perpetual pregnancy among your people. So what do you mean by 'years'?"

"Our gestation periods are longer than yours," the sharp-faced womer answered bluntly. "Womer do not conceive in a constant stream as do women, it is true – for now, at least," she added in a mutter garnished with a grimace and a sad flinch from Ilandra, "but in Alinor, we may bear one child anywhere from three to seven years."

"Oh." I did not know what to say. "How interesting; I never knew. I never met a pregnant womer to know her for the full span of her term, to be honest."

The sleek-headed womer nodded perfunctorily. "It is to be expected. We conceive rarely."

"But it's not really the issue, here," Ilandra burst in. "So there are some superficial differences between women and womer, and men and women; it doesn't really matter, because it's not enough of a basis to act upon. It's ridiculous to say that all men are better suited than all women to physical labor; clearly some will not be, even if most are."

I nodded grudgingly. "Granted. It is a general trend, not an absolute rule."

"Does it really make sense to follow the idea of 'courtesy to women' as an ideal, though, if it isn't absolute?" the womer went on. "Some men would be belittled by it, if they cannot measure up."

"True," I ceded again. "But what of it? Can we not have criteria upon which to judge what a real man is, an ideal to which all can aspire?" I raised an eyebrow dubiously, startled at the slant the conversation had taken.

Ilandra gave a little shrug of her thin shoulders. "Well, certainly you can. Understand, Jon; I'm not trying to belittle your culture. I'm just trying to understand it for what it is."

"But you don't think it should be what it is."

"Nooo," she said slowly, shaking her head, "no, I think there's a place for all cultures in the world. They're all beautiful and the world would be quite boring if there weren't differences. I think it's fine the way it is; it's just that, for me personally, it seems like that way of assigning roles and characters to people based purely on their sex is very restricting and stifling. We have little of such things; among us, mer are not expected to lift things for womer, or anything of the sort. It seems like it's much better to come to people with no preconceived notions about who they are, and to just discover them for yourself. I'm just trying to see if maybe this 'Colovian chivalry' still allows for that, somehow." She finished in a rush, an earnest shining in her emerald eyes.

I did not answer for a moment, busy as I was marveling and wondering just what sort of elves I had landed myself with, after all. The three watched me, expectantly silent. The edaphomancer's daughter was still utterly passive, with her elbow on the sill of the curtained window and her smooth cheek on her wrist, gleaming hair pouring over her shoulder and down around her feet like raw byssus.

"I see," I managed, lamely. "Well, you have a… point." I had not the heart to tell her that most men would have said that the reason elves did not expect any different from their males than from their females was because elven males were just as weak and flabby-limbed and soft-handed as elven females. "I suppose our cultures are simply different, there. Very different."

"I suppose," Ilandra allowed, a disappointed softness in her voice. She sat back against her seat, looking down at her slim hands. I put my gaze to the window to ride out the awkward moment. We had long since attained the full skyway, and the etched vibrancy of the terraced valley spread out around us beneath its gleaming net of glass. The sun had risen at last on the opposite side of the carriage; its effulgent glint blinked at me past the soft silhouette of the womer at my side. Its light slid down her hair like oil, just as it slid along the glass lacework over the fields. The view from my window, though, was still dull grey sky and violet-veiled mountains, slinking shadows and misty dips. The tripletted clatter of the horses' hooves rang swift and regular, singing bell-bright on the glass.

I turned back to the pair across from me after a few minutes of musing silence; a matter had recurred to me.

"I have a curiousity of my own, if you wouldn't mind indulging it," I said. Ilandra looked up from her hands, eyes startled and clear with openness. It was her partner that answered, though.

"Certainly, Jon," Rumarene said matter-of-factly. "What is your question?" She fixed me with those narrow black eyes, beaming efficiency and expectation; state your request quickly and a curiousity satisfaction associate will be with you shortly.

"Well," I began, "Tsirelsyn said something about seeing – something, in me. Morphing souls, or something? And you mentioned it too, Ilandra, and you, Rumarene, the first time we – er – met." My cheeks reddened slightly, and her lips curled upward with something that almost resembled _mischievousness. _Ah, but she is a strange mix, that one. I half think she doesn't herself know what she is and what she wants to be.

"Ah, of course, you wouldn't know yet," Ilandra answered. "After all, they don't even have rudimentary edaphomancy in your country, do they? Let me explain. The word Tsiri used was 'morphisol,' which is our name for a specific type of soil that predominates in the pedological character of the Nibenay Basin. He also mentioned alfisols, I think, and gelisols, which refer to forest and frost dominated soils respectively."

"O… k…" I said slowly, confused. "And this has… what, exactly, to do with Colovian chivalry?"

"It's just an indicator," Rumarene answered briskly. "One of the simpler tricks of our craft, one that comes to us all with a few years of practice, is the ability to sense and feel the pedological profile of a person or thing. With a quick look we can see what manners of soils gave you birth, and we can draw some simple conclusions about where you have probably spent the most time, and about what sort of associations you might have for that time spent. A longer look can really let us get to know the soils in your history, even down to those you contacted only through others – but that takes both time and effort. Tsiri simply expressed surprise because he had not noticed the other soils in your profile that give a hint at your Colovian and Nordic associations."

"It's odd, actually," Ilandra said, turning to the shorter elf with a perplexed smirk dimpling her cheeks. "Tsiri is very difficult to surprise, when it comes to that sort of thing. Often he knows a person down to their parent material after just a short conversation. It's odd that he missed something in your profile at first, Jon," she said, looking back to me.

"It is," agreed Rumarene. She frowned, and peered closely at me through her slitted black eyes. "It must be very faint, though. All I can find is classic Nibenay Basin morphisol." Her partner nodded agreement, and I squirmed a bit under the intensity of their scrutiny. It is no small thing, to be told that a people can analyze your history down to your birth just from sight alone, and then to be subjected to two such focused investigations! I was a bit unnerved. Under that sort of focus, Cehseekye's calm, stoic stare was almost comforting in comparison.

"Am I understanding correctly?" I asked uncomfortably. "You're saying that edaphomancers can… _see _into my past?"

"It's not really seeing," Rumarene answered without breaking focus. "Not really. Seeing is just one medium. Touch is better."

"And not really your past," fray-haloed Ilandra chimed smoothly. "Although the truly skilled, like Tsiri and Cehs here, can get there, too, through it."

"It's a sense," the sharp-faced womer continued, slipping flawlessly into the cadence of her partner's words. "A sense of your associations. We get a feel for existing entanglements, after a while, and a sense of the breadth of interwoven associations – if we have some way to become entangled with the subject ourselves, of course."

Ilandra took up the vein; it was almost as if they spoke as one being, so smoothly did they pass the thread of the conversation between them. "Sight is the easiest, usually, merely for practical reasons, but any form of contact or communication will do. Touch gives a better resolution. Communication is really the best, though; speech, or writing, or music."

"For strangers, she means," Ruma explained. "None of that is necessary if you are already familiar with the subject, though they do make things sharper… you, though… it's difficult to tell… hmmm…" She frowned, squinting black slashes at me.

"Er – do you mind?" I said awkwardly.

They paid no mind, too engrossed in sifting through whatever metaphysical aura it was they could see, whatever associations they could find in my life to focus on me in the now; they leaned forward in their seats, as though magnetically attracted to me, their eyes fixed on some telescoping prismatic point within my soul. I'm not sure they even heard me speak.

Then, suddenly, a sharp snap cracked through the carriage, and the two womer jolted backward, looking around dazedly.

"Get your eye-sleeves out of his life, he said," a low, riche voice hummed into the silence, full and smooth as honey, and I realized that the edaphomancer's daughter had stirred herself at last; Cehseekye had fixed the two open-mouthed Altmer across from us with a stern, no-nonsense stare from those heavy-lidded eyes, and her slim fingers hung poised in the afterimage of a click.

"Do you know nothing of polity and subtlety, children?" she went on. "If you will look into the profile of one who is not accustomed to our ways, at least do so without being as obvious as lovestruck nymphs. You looked like lazy-eyed cephalopods." It was my turn to stare.

"Of course, Cehs," Ilandra answered humbly, bowing her head. "Apologies, Jon. We should not have pried into your profile without your permission."

"Ah, it's no big issue," I said, blushing slightly. "I'm just not… well, accustomed to your ways as of yet, as madame Cehseekye said."

"I'm amazed you're not staring too, Cehs," Rumarene said, shaking her bobbed head. "Haven't you _looked _at him?"

"I have not," the womer's low voice rolled out baldly. "Nor has my father to much extent, I expect. There is a certain measure of restraint to be exercised with your talents, young ones. It is not meet that you should perceive always in the seat of snares, for how then will you sympathize with the rest of the world? To understand them, you must see as they do. This is the first step to interface with any individual: convention upon equal ground." Her voice seemed to fill the carriage for long moments after she fell silent.

"Yes, Mother," Ilandra murmured, and this time Rumarene echoed her and bowed her head as well. Cehseekye merely watched them for a long moment, expression unreadable, and then turned her peach-lush eyes back to her window, pillowing her cheek on her palm.

"It's quite all right, really," I said after a moment, embarrassed to have seen the two chastised on my account. And called young, to boot, when I am positive that they are centuries older than I – at the least. "I don't mind. I would appreciate if you could explain more fully, though. What is it, exactly, that you mean when you talk about my 'profile'?"

"Ah, of course," Ilandra said, shaking her head. "I forget you have only been studying for a few days. Well, think of the solum, this morning; the horizons, which are many different soils and stages of soils layered atop one another. We call that the soil profile."

I nodded quickly. "Yes, yes, I remember Tsiri mentioned something of the sort. But what has that to do with me?"

"You have a soil profile, Jon," Rumarene answered bluntly. "Everyone has a soil profile. As we are all born from the soils upon which we live, we are both composed of and tied to those soils; they make up who we are and influence our lives, even when we have become sundered from them. As an individual moves and comes into contact with others, they are birthed anew by other soils, and these new associations become layered within the old, forming a series of amberical horizons. That horizonality is what we call a pedological profile."

I swear my head started to spin, at that point. So many consequences of entanglement that I had never considered. And this idea of soils as 'birthing' us – it seems to be both pervasive and important, but unfortunately I was a bit too overwhelmed at the time to ask for a proper explanation of _why _they think that is so.

"So… so…" I stuttered confusedly. "Ok, ok, just hang on a minute. You're saying that you are able to trace the full breadth of a man's entanglement just be becoming slightly entangled with him yourself?"

"Yes," Rumarene answered simply. Ilandra bobbed an earnest nod. "Not just of a man, though, but of any subject."

"Okay," I said. "Okay, that I can understand. That's simple enough, in theory._ How _do you do it, though?"

"How?" Rumarene repeated, nonplussed.

"It's just a matter of experience, Jon," Ilandra answered eagerly. "As you spend more and more time working with ambericity, you develop more and more a feel for how it is working in the world around you. After a while you can begin to really sense and explore the world through those nonobvious connections."

"How much experience?" I asked. "How long do you have to work with the entanglement principle before such a skill develops?" I wondered, of course, whether I would be acquiring it any time soon; I have been working in the field, via my comprehension studies, for near a decade now, after all."

The two looked at each other musingly, cocking their heads in an amusingly identical mannerism; they clearly spent a great deal of time together.

"It depends, I think," Ilandra answered slowly, looking back to me. "For us it was – what, three decades? Four? But for you – unless you happen to be one of those with a natural talent for it – it would probably be around eighty to ninety years."

The momentary rush of coldness that stirred in my stomach at the hint of racism in her words allowed me to restrain my surprise's expression to a single raised eyebrow. "This is not a short-term pursuit, I see. I suppose that isn't surprising. But please, do tell me why the process should require more time for me than it did for you." I kept the resentment in that as light as I possibly could, but I don't think I was successful; Ilandra's dimple-cheeked face fell slightly, and she blinked at with her eyes wide and hurt.

"Il said that because she assumed that you lack, simply for cultural reasons, something that we have," Rumarene explained, taking the taller womer's slim hand gently in her own. "And by that I mean that we – that all elves, because of Tsiri – are given amberical foci, which expedite the process. To our knowledge, there is no such practice in Cyrodiil, or anywhere else on Tamriel, so Ilandra assumed that you would not have any comparable enhancement. But, as Tsiri said, we have not yet reached our studies of Cyrodiilic culture, so perhaps that assumption was erroneous." She squeezed Ilandra's fingers, as though to show that she meant no offense by that last.

"Ah. I – well, no, no you're correct," I replied distractedly. "We have no such custom." Which did not mean that I had no such focus; the Mangler seemed to burn in the pocket of my robes. Odd, that those who had just told me that they could trace entanglements at will and had just spent minutes staring into my soul should subsequently assume that I did not possess such a thing. I am indubitably, inextricably entangled with the thing, by trauma and time, so it is odd that they could not sense it in my 'pedological profile.' But they are the Youngest; perhaps their talents are simply not developed sufficiently. Regardless, I am relieved that they did not recognize it; the Kemendelia are clearly friends, now, but I have spent too many years hiding the real purpose of the thing from those who would steal my research to be comfortable with its exposure in the full context of its function.

Also, it is good to know that some secrets, at least, can still be kept from these soil-spies.

We slipped into silence for a time, then, and the _karetetit-karetetit-karetetit _of the horses' hooves on the glass and the sonorous aura of their wake ruled our ears as the carriage flew across the city-isle. The sun had truly risen as we spoke, and its light poured in the east-facing windows, filling the compartment with a flowing, limpid glow; the splinter-spun parquet walls seemed to resonate with the rich hues of its resin, and both Ilandra and Cehseekye, seated nearest to the lit windows, were flushed with effulgence; those heavy eyes, blush-lush, lashes licked by light; that wide mouth, smooth and… but I did not keep my attention on the carriage's contents, of course. I was too busy pondering over the revelations I had been given; the idea of this 'pedological profile,' and that _all _Altmer, not just the edaphomancers, were given amberical foci. For what could they need such things? Certainly the practice had not been common under the rule of the Ayleids, or my Mangler would not be the oddity that it is. Why should the Altmer find such a thing necessary? And what form do their foci take? Something similar to my Mangler, perhaps? But, no, I would have seen if all Altmer carried such things. Wouldn't I? Perhaps. Certainly Aatheril recognized its construction, when he examined it upon our arrival, so perhaps I am wrong in that assumption.

Yes, I was far too busy to think of that sleek-haired womer next to me, far too occupied to think of her lips, or her eyes, or her shoulders, those full-firm shoulders. There were the mysteries to ponder, and when I had exhausted those, there was Alinor itself waiting outside my window, streaming slowly by so far below. We had left Arbasdiil's valley, by then, and passed over the broad, terrace-countoured saddle at its northern end. The lands beyond were more tumultuous than the valley's broad, easy swells and dips; the terraces tightened in on one another, there, shrunk sharp round the contours of the city-isle's vertebrae. It was once a rough, rugged place, I think, but its crags and crannies, its cresting outcroppings and jagged cliffs, its crystalline encrustations and raw-bony abrasions, have long since been tutored and tamed by the artifice of Alinor; the jagging, granite-hewn stairways that coil and cross those terrace-gagged hills and canyons are long since weather-round and ice-split, as are the many honey-combed stone spires that rear out from the etched land's constrictions and the arched entries of the humbler hillside-swallowed barrow-homes. Like everywhere else in Alinor, it is a land subjugated to production, and to the insatiable elven need for control.

But all that is not to say that it is not a beautiful sight to behold. The vegetation is different than that of Arbasdiil's valley; I could see that even from our sweeping height. The greens are darker, richer, moodier, and interspersed with frondy greys and dim violets. The narrow ledges overflow with plant matter, as though the sea's green waters well up from beneath the island in a thousand bowing fountains; stout shrubs and tender herbs and creeping sedums spill from terrace to terrace in silent sprays of swaying life. There are more trees, there, than in the valley; the cracks in the terrace walls are sealed up and sturdied with the stoutness of gnarled, black-purple roots, supporting the eternal bows of their wind-twisted wardens; stonefruits of some kind, it seemed, though whether plum or peach or cherry or pear or some unique Alinorian fruit I could not discern from that distance. Flowers crown the crests, ringing the bases of spires and the scattered barrow mounds with frills of brilliant white, soft violet, bee's bottom yellow. It is the height of summer, now; in Alinor, where the gentle heat fills you up like buttered beer in the snow, where the flora never fades or falters, and where the stark blue sky is ever frothed with mountains of pure cumulus sailing in the sun. And even in the artifice itself, I begin to see a kind of beauty; the elves have carven and shaped and scraped their land into forms it should never have taken to satisfy their unquenchable thirst for resource utilization, but yet there is something soft, something gentle in the way their stairstrips and pathways, their ancient balconies and spattered gazebos, blend with the life around them. They – fit. The scene – melds with itself into something whole and beautiful; the terraced ledges and the bud-bursting excesses and the glimmering glass nets strung between the hillsides are all… comfortable with each other as cozied cats. It is like an exquisitely kept garden, where every plant and every path is well-tended and well-loved by masters of the craft. It is the fusion of wilderness and civilization, of green and grey, field and fountain. It is a horticulturalist's paradise.

I suppose it is only to be expected. This is the garden of immortals. It is only natural that this people should become entwined with their home throughout the millennia of their lives, that they should learn how to so perfectly adapt themselves to their environment, and their environment to themselves. I thought them utterly alienated from their land, but I was wrong; no people could cultivate such beauty, such coexistent perfection, without feeling the love of and for Nirn. Among the Kemendelia, at least – that is to say, in the city-isle's sub-urban districts – there can be no doubt that the people love their land; it is evident in every walkway, every bowing branch, every tidy bed, and in every inch of the black earth beneath it all, in every thread of edaphomancy's womb-web. Alinor-urban may have rejected this intimacy, but Alinorian agriculture most definitely has not. They are led by sorcerers dedicated to love, after all. And in the quiet coexistence of impulse and design, that love is hum-mellow evident.

Such were my thoughts as the sonorous stream of the horses' hooves pulled us on along with the flow of brilliance-beaded glass through those jutting hills, between the towering terrace-steppes and their moody lushnesses. Comforting thoughts. Peaceful thoughts. And odd, really. The sight of the city-isle's agricultural districts once disturbed me, once shunted me into angst and agitation. I was so blind, then. So unreceptive to Alinor's strange beauties. Ah, but again you stray toward self-recrimination, Jon, and that time is done. You have chastised yourself enough; better to focus now on the character of the land, and the details of the journey. Record them now, while they are yet fresh and crisp.

The land rose gradually as we progressed ever farther north, its furrows deepening into ever steeper balcony-walled canyons and shade-laden valleys, its crests stretching ever higher, ever sharper; mountains rose up around our aerial path in the dripping sun, slab-sided and bluff-browed. Trees sprung up ever more prevalent and expansive, curling stoutly out from the stacked horizons and spreading their decurrent limbs broadly across cliff and abyss, but the overall character of the vegetation remained largely the same; deep green and moody grey, enveloping and vibrant regardless of altitude. But then – then our narrowing skyway rounded the curve of a bluff's narrow bend, and with my arm pressed tight against the carriage's wooden wall by the sharpness of the turn I saw something entirely different.

Where all else is lushness and life, there is desolation and death; where all else is order embodied, there is chaos congealed; where all else is soft green and gentle grey, there is blank black and shard-splintered slate; where all else is pitted granite and lichen-licked basalt, there is carapace-contoured mold-stone. It was once a hillside like any other, I think, but its crest is now blasted to bits, a blackened crater in its place, its terraces tumbled to steep boulder fields, its breast rent with jagged chasms, its stairstrips and groundhouses buried beneath banks of dull, dead ash, its shattered steppes encrusted with bulbous blisters and congealed magma-pus. It is as though a piece of a harsher world lies there, inexplicably annexed within Alinor.

"Did you have an eruption?" I asked curiously without turning from the window, but pointing past the curtains in explanation.

"An eruption, Jon?" Ilandra's gentle voice asked curiously; of course, she was on the wrong side of the carriage to see.

"Not technically," Rumarene answered on the heels of her partner's words. "Look where we are, Il. He means the wasteland of the sun's exile." I turned from the window, at that, and cocked an eyebrow curiously across the compartment. Ildara's sculpted eyebrows had risen in understanding, and her lips had formed once more their characteristic little 'o'.

"Hegath av meldianar?" I repeated, for that was how she had actually put it; we spoke Altmeri, of course. "What do you mean by that?"

Rumarene hesitated a single second, pursing her narrow lips, then spoke, slow and careful. "You know of the Mythic Dawning, Jon?"

"Ahhhh, of course," I said, nodding with realization. "Yes, Oblivion's uprising is of course in every history. So this site, then, was one of those touched by the Deadlands of Mehrunes Dagon?"

The womer's slit eyes tightened slightly. "Yes," she answered after a moment. "Essentially, yes."

I nodded understandingly. "Yes, it is much the same across most of Tamriel. The land does not heal swiftly from the touch of Oblivion. The scars endure long, and are only slowly overtaken by the natural vegetation."

Ildara and Rumarene traded an inscrutable look between them, avoiding my eye, and then both glanced briefly, as though afraid, toward the womer seated at my side. She was just as still and silent as she had been for the past few hours, staring past the black byssus curtains from beneath those heavy, downcast eyelids and twisting the shimmering sheet of her hair in one hand.

Ilandra spoke hesitantly into the pause. "It… is not so much that we are unable to restore the land to what it once was, Jon," she said. "We could do that, if we wished, but to do so would be to reject a whole host of new and different patterns of possibility."

I frowned in surprise. "But do you not want to reject those patterns? I mean to say, they are the patterns of Mehrunes Dagon, Lord of Destruction. Surely they are rife with quinoa? That cannot be good for your soils." Cehseekye's twisting fingers stilled suddenly.

"Dagon's sphere is change, Jon, not destruction," Ilandra explained. "Destruction is simply one manifestation of change, and is not at all the same thing as quinoa, the source of sundering. The Deadlands have no soils, as such, but the ash and the lava that poured through the liminal rifts of the Dawning are extremely charged with possibility. The soils that develop from that manner of parent material – andisols, we call them – are incredibly fertile. By embracing the patterns that Dagon gifted to us, we are able to incorporate a great power into our tangled – into our entangled soil webs. In other words, what seems wasteland now will one day become some of the most fertile sites on the island."

"And yet 200 years have passed, and this seems almost to have been done yesterday," I replied, pointing down at the blasted hilltop beneath us. "If you have been incorporating this explosion of patterns and powers into your soils, should it not show at least some accelerated development."

"Edaphomancy is not a swiftly worked craft, Jon," the womer answered. Her clear green eyes fluttered back and forth between the floor and my eye. "Everything we do requires time, and there are not enough of us to both perform our normal duties and focus on the site of every liminal rift all at once. Besides, there are certain – pressures delaying our efforts." I cocked an eyebrow, and with a flashed look up at me she hurried on to explain. "There are a select few organisms that can only grow in the ash of the Deadlands, and they all happen to have useful alchemical traits. The apothecaries prefer us to leave these areas as they are, and cultivate upon them the few things that came through from Oblivion with the Daedra. Many also view them as memorials," she finished in a rush, "for the many memories lost in the Mythic Dawning."

"Ah, yes," I said gently. It must still be fresh in their minds, those dark days; likely, I was the only one in that compartment who had not lived through them. "The suffering was very great here, I have read."

"As it was across all Tamriel," Ilandra replied swiftly.

I shook my head. "But not all Tamriel lost as much as some," I said gravely. "Not every people suffered such great _cultural _destruction, I mean." The two were staring at me, pop-eyed, lips sealed tightly together in sharp pale lines. I should have realized, at that, but the only thought in my head was that the memory must be even sharper than I had realized. I blundered on. "Morrowind suffered grave devastation, I hear, even before its ultimate fall. And of course nothing can compare to _your _loss. The fall of Crystal Tower, I mean – ahh!"

My own damn fault. They had tried to warn me, hadn't they? I should have noticed how oddly nervous Ildara was, and I certainly shouldn't have blundered on when I saw them blanched and shaping like aspens in a storm. A right smart idea, Jon, to remind a set of ancient elves that the greatest monument of their people was destroyed by demons. Two centuries past, aye, but that must seem little more than a few years to one who has lived for millennia. Of course I do not know how old she is, but with a father like hers… I must seem like a mewling babe. I must seem so ignorant, so obtuse, so blind to the intricacy of the world. She has had thousands of years to become initiated, and I have had a few scant days. I cannot blame her for her behavior. I think I would have done much the same, if a little child had tried so arrogantly and presumptively to console me for a tragedy he did not even understand. Although I do understand, somewhat. Crystal-like-Law was not merely a tower to them, or even merely their most ancient architectural heirloom. It was, in a very concrete sense, the center of their character. It was their largest ancestral repository, where the remains of inestimable generations of elves rested, where their spirits lingered on in guidance and grounding. It was a spiritual pillar. It defined who they were as a people in much the same way that White-Gold defined the Empires of Men for so many years, although for different reasons. White-Gold was a symbol of mannish power; a beloved artifact of the Ayleids taken by force in the ancient slave uprisings. But Crystal Tower… it was their constant, their symbol of immutability. I can only imagine what the effects of its loss must have been – must still be, really, for a society does not recover in mere centuries from the loss of the beacon that guided them out of the Merethic Era – especially not an elven society. They have seemed so solid, so centered, so arrogantly self-assured, but I wonder, now, whether that isn't all just a façade, a brittle mask plastered over the terror-stricken truth. They have lost what defines them as a people. Small wonder that it has been a tumultuous time for them, as elves judge these things; the rise of the Thalmor, the reformation of the Aldmeri Dominion, the Great War between the Empire and the Dominion – it is a lot of upheaval. And I wonder, now, if it isn't mostly attributable to the destabilizing psychological effect of Crystal-like-Law's loss.

I twisted in my seat, writhing with the sudden knot of pain screwing into my scalp with the wrenching fingers snarled in my hair. I stared up, blinking with shocked tears, into the face that filled my vision.

"No, human," Cehseekye said, and in that quiet voice all richness had turned to rasp. "You will not speak of this." Her eyes opened wide, as I had never seen them; black and gold, deeper than depth. There was nothing in the world save her eyes, and her fingers hard in my hair. "You have not the right." She searched my gaze a moment longer. My face tingled tightly. And then she released me, loosening her fingers from my hair and her eyes from my soul. She sat back in her seat; turned back to the window, pillowed her cheek on the hand that had just tried to rip out a patch of my scalp, and was quite suddenly as still, as stoic, as half-lid peaceful as if she had never moved.

I stared blankly down at my dangling toes for a few moments, stunned by the violence and suddenness of the assault, still feeling her fingers clenched against my head, still seeing her face just inches from mine. I was too ashamed to meet the eyes of the Youngest. I did not want to see the compassion I knew I would find there. My head ached. I looked up, and out the window, and saw nothing.

We spoke no more, after that little scene. I kept my eye firmly fixed on the topography flowing around us, and neither Rumarene nor Ilandra made any attempt to break the tense, awkward silence tied taut and charged between myself and the silent, stoic womer next to me. My head still throbs, faintly, where her fingers touched. She is stronger than I would have expected. Every time I chanced the briefest glance at her from the narrowest corner of my eye my stomach clenched as though wrapped round with golden cord, and my hands tingled as though with the splinters of sleep. I said nothing, and we rode in silence save for the _karetetit-karetetit-karetetit _of the horses' hooves and, now and then, the cheerful voice of Tsirelsyn floating on the slipstream as he chit-chatted with his venerable goblin friend.

I remember little of the rest of the journey's scenery; I was too brain-blitzed to notice much beyond the fact that the land continued its upward trend, developing into true boulder-breasted, slab-sided mountains in that style so peculiar to Alinor; abrupt, yet soft-edged; until the shining stream of Alinor's skyway and the sonorous strokes of Alinorian hooves swung us between the leaning walls of a narrow canyon and then out, at last, to the domain of our destination.

_Onda av Nilenen, _they call that vale; 'Falling of the Water Flowers.' It unfolds from the jutting cliffs with that peculiar mountain-mastered poignancy, that ripeness of revelation unveiled by degrees of perspective, that pulls one ever on, that special sense of interfaced individuality bud-bursting free just with one's arrival, as though the land is saying, "And here you are at last! I am perfection, and you are perfection, and the moment of our mutuation is now!" The lush ledges spread themselves at your feet, kneeling steeply down to the bottom of the rounded basink; the jutting round-faced walls of the mountains leap out to either side, ridge-ringing; the shining path frays and falls into ten narrow tracks circumventing the bowl's center; the scudding cloud-mounts skirt the sun; and the lakes lift their glittering petals in greeting. One source: the mist-frilled spray-thunder spurting forth from the smitten crown of the opposite slope's crystal-cragged apex, streaking the skies with its sickle-shine before tumbling down, down, down onto the blunt boulders of the highest ledge; three sub-streams, sliced by elf-ear stone spires to equal angles; twenty-seven pools trained to the slope's terraces, fed on the flow of their superiors' sexual excess, a blazing waterfall array guarded by greenery; one sink: the broad bottom of the bowl, where collects all the nectar of the vale's aqueous flowers in a skim of limpid golden gleam. That is Onda av Nilenen; that is the Falling of the Water Flowers.

And that is the home of Angavadel, or Offering Cottage.

Only a single strand of the splintered skyway sweeps down the terrace-stepped slope and into the valley proper. We slid down its sigmoidal length, the horses' hooves tapping their bell-blaring steps more slowly; down, past the swaying sea-foam canopy's stuttered plunge; down, past the broadening topography slices in their glory of green and past their pearl-poised outbuildings; down to the still, golden waters, reflecting back the carriage's splinter-spun aspect - moments sealed in liquid amber – as we floated between the web-footed pylons; down t the kiss-cusp of the circle drive that rose to receive us on the opposite shore; down to Angavadel, and to one of the strangest hearths at which I have ever been hosted.

Most striking is the strangeness of its composition and construction. While the builders of Angavadel eschewed the impracticalities of crystal and sculpted marble so common in much of Alinorian architecture, they opted instead for something which may be even more wrongheaded: a metal, lustrous silver under an iridescent sheen, and bizarrely shaped, as though it was grown on-site like some crystal whose matricial motivation has mastered a pattern I can only call a 'schizophrenic square;' all jig-jaggering squiggle-squirm elbows in staggered relief, piling stairsteps on stairsteps in melt-mingled conjunctions. The whole building is like that; craze-faced, rainbow-oiled blocks piled atop one another and conjoined at odd angles into a blunt-edged conglomeration-mound jutting here and there with outcropping cubes large and small. Windows pierce the walls here and there, on close inspection, centered in the right-angled coils of its stairstepped relief, but they are not always where one would expect them; I saw their dark glint sparking from the undersides of the building's many faces, cutting diagonals across their tops, and even, occasionally, stuck on at tilted, skewed angles. It took me nearly a minute to locate the entryway, as we pulled up before the place on the edge of the glassway's contrast curve; the massive double doors were embossed with a jewel-bitted simile of the building's skin. I have seen many obtuse designs in my time here in Alinor, but this one about outstrips them all.

Strangely named, too, for it bears as little resemblance to a cottage as any structure I have ever seen, quite aside from its bizarre build; its basal module is large enough in itself for a respectable manor, nestled snug against the granite of the Falling's first terrace, veiled in the nectarine mist of two of the steppe-spread's lake-leaks, but the place extends throughout the entirety of the stuttering slope, extruding here and there on the shores of the piling pool blossoms in gynochromic schizophrenia-squares as large as many a rich merchant's home. It is about the last manner of dwelling I expected from the manor of a soil-sorcerer – but, ah well, what can one do? This is Alinor, and its elves have aesthetic ideas I cannot begin to fathom. Even the edaphomancers.

The tripletted clack of the horses' hooves slowed, and then stopped, their sonorous wake fading gently away. The carriage had stopped; the mound of gynochromic metal loomed above us, and the spray-spattered terraces and their glistening foliage above that. A spurt of excitement stirred in my heart once more; I was actually _there, _outside an elf's private manor, by invitation, working my way at last into the real earth of this people.

Ilandra stirred, sitting forward on the edge of her seat and arching her back in a groaning stretch.

"Here at last, are we?" she said on a sigh, peering past Rumarene and through the byssus curtains. "Ah. Good. Carriage rides make pains in my posterior."

"Why didn't you lie down?" Rumarene asked, looking at the sun-scraggled womer with subtle devotion in those inky black eyes. "A pillow is the true purpose of a lap."

Ilandra smiled sweetly down at the sleek-headed elf, her cheeks dimpling deeply. She took Rumarene's skinny little hand in hers and pressed a kiss to her palm.

"I didn't think of it this time, for some reason," she said. "But it is no matter. Perhaps someone will want to massage me back to looseness, later."

Rumarene's narrow lips spread in a slow smile, caught on her sharp white teeth. "Someone might want to. One never can know what uncertainty's vagaries will produce."

"Indeed not," Ilandra answered, and giggled brightly. "For now, though, I'm fairly certain that they will produce an exit from this compartment. Let us go." She stretched her legs out before her, wiggling her long, bare golden toes, then rose to a slight stoop and unlatched the tiger-eyed door. She leapt lightly to the glass ground, and Rumarene followed swiftly… leaving me alone with the compartment's third occupant.

I did not look, but I heard the slick rustle of sea-silk as she stood, and I felt the stir of her body in the tremor of my bones and in the prickling of my skin. I kept my eye on the strangeness of the building outside. She stepped past me, and slipped out the open door without a sound. Still, I waited; better to just give her a few minutes to make her way off from me and relieve a bit of the residual resentment pressure. But my toes had just touched the parquet compartment floor when she reappeared at the door.

"They want to stable the horses," she said bluntly, meeting my eye squarely and promptly paralyzing all my limbs.

"Right," I managed after a sweaty second. "Coming out now." She backed a few steps away, but kept that black-gold gaze fixed unwaveringly upon me, her full lips set stiff and stoic-straight. I kept my eye on my feet as I straightened fully – there was enough and more room for me, of course – and lowered myself down the carriage's steep steps and onto the gleaming glass.

"This is my place," that voice whispered, silky smooth and ripe-rich once more. It pulled me up from the hem of her robes and into the entangling pull of her heavy-lidded eyes. "Mine." Her gaze searched my eye, slow and steady. And then – "Welcome. Welcome to Angavadel." Some faint of hint of warmth, echoed between the words' tone and meaning, bolstered my heart.

"My thanks, madame," I said quietly, "and my apologies."

She said nothing, but nodded that soft chin, a shadow of a softening to her mouth, and then strode silently away down the shining stream, toward a steep-scaling stair at the edge of the manor's mound. Her hair fluttered softly around her, a shimmering sheet of red-gold chatoyancy in the sheen of the setting sun, bead-burdened with nectarine spray.

I turned away, shaking my head slightly to clear off the image of her eyes. The womer has a striking gaze. Very striking. I do hope I can repair things with her. It does not do to alienate the daughter of one's host before one has even fully arrived. Bad form. But I think there is some hope, if I do things correctly. At any rate I'm not going to think about her any more tonight. There is plenty else. Plenty.

"Ah, Jon!" Tsirelsyn's deep, booming voice startled me back into alertness. He bounded forward from around the back of the carriage's bed, huge hands filled with a prodigious display of cases, bags, boxes, and my own portmanteau, seeming child's toy tiny in comparison with that bare bear's paw. He pattered to an eager halt before me, long feet slapping on the glass, and hurriedly set down his enormous load to envelop my hands in his and exercise my biceps with a series of hefty, vigorous pumps. I smiled fondly up into his brightly beaming eyes.

"Hello, Tsiri," I said. "Did you enjoy the journey?"

"Very much!" he exclaimed with a broad grin. "That Germong's an interesting old fellow! I've known him since he was a wee thing, of course, but he still manages to surprise me! He was telling me he set up a sculptor's guild among some of the goblins, years and years ago. Imagine that! A whole guild of goblins excavating away outside the solum and carving all manner of amazing things, for _decades _now, and I never knew!" He shook his head, laughing silently in delight. "Amazing. And he drives excellently. Did you notice how smooth and fast that was?"

"I… did not," I answered awkwardly. "We were occupied with other things."

The mer shrugged his broad, bony shoulders and grinned with one side of his mouth. "Ah, well. That is good too. Getting to know each other a bit better, I hope?"

My cheeks heated. "Yes, yes. There is so much for me to learn that there is never an end to my questions."

He chuckled, cocking his head fondly. "The core of edaphomancy, Jon: the desire to understand. You have it in great measure. It is well that this should be so. It will serve you well in your studies, and in life. Which is really saying the same thing, eh?" His bright eyes crinkled down at me, and he gave my hands one final, friendly squeeze with his warm paws.

"But enough of that now!" he exclaimed as he released me and bent low to gather up the many bags and burdens that had sprung apart across the glass without the steadying influence of his long fingers, "there will be plenty of time for that later! Now we must get you settled in and comfortable. Come along; Il and Ruma already went inside." He beckoned toward the huge, gem-mazed double doors, and then set off briskly up the broad, rainbow-oiled metal stairs, taking two at a time the steps that had me nearly clambering. I've heard of certain unorthodox, backward healers that construct braces for the knees of their patients as a preemptive measure to re-injury, and I think I would have ordered a pair if I had known Alinor would be so steep. I fear I will leave here a cripple.

"I can't say how pleased I am to hear that you've been getting to know my daughter and my Youngest," the giant elf said with quiet earnestness as he pushed open the door and ushered me through the dark gap. "You must meet everyone, everyone! There are very many people here who will want to meet you, Jon, and help you in your studies, and you must meet them all! Oh, but I think you will like it here. I hope so. We must get you settled, though! Come, come, let us find your chamber." He spoke with such eager swiftness and fired frenzy, such obvious delight and excitement shining from his eyes that I barely noticed the mansion's foyer; I was too caught up in the cleansing gush of Tsirelsyn's optimism and vivacity flushing through my heart. It was only after his broad-beaming grin and simple sincerity had released me, when he turned to set aside all of the luggage save my little portmanteau and tripped his barefooted way off into the depths of the house that I was able to take a good, analytical look around my home for the foreseeable future.

The strangeness the manor presented to me this time was one of contrast within itself; of utter disunity and contradiction of parts. The simple fact is that Angavadel's innards make no sense. They simply cannot belong to the same structure I saw outside. Not that the interior is not sufficiently strange, but that it is so far removed from the character of strangeness of the building's exterior that the two ought, by rights, to repel or obliterate each other; their coexistence is more odd than the sum of their separate aesthetics. Angavadel's exterior is hard, cold, sharp, multihued, and schizophrenia-squared; its interior is soft, smooth, and gentle; rounded in every direction. Its exterior is crystallized metal; the interior is warped rosewood oiled to a dark sheen and bent in quiet corner-denial. The hallways are tall octagons lit along their length by amber insets hidden in low alcoves and emanating their dim, honey-humming glow through the still air so that one's every breath is imbued with dawn-diffusion. It is the color of flesh-filtered sunlight, and as warm as summer's light-gilt languor. Thick, plush, red-brown carpets pool along the floors, as though dripped from the ceilings; great dollops of softness that accept one's feet like rich turf or dark duff. I was fascinated by the way Tsirelsyn's toes sank into them; so gentle, so soft. I wanted to remove my boots right there and feel that softness for myself. The place is sparsely furnished, otherwise; decorated with a simple elegance by an occasional potted plant or gemstone display.

Passages and cross-passages from ballroom-broad to shoulder-thin meld with each other at odd angles, the parquet boards bending smoothly out the edges; like the curves of tree branch and buttress, in the stead of elf-ear acuteness. Doors, too, here and there; great round things with handles of polished brass, carven in all manner of fantastical organa; roots, worms, bark, leaves, bugs, lizards, fish, serpents, dragons, and eggs, eggs, eggs, everywhere eggs in all varieties imaginable. There are no corners or bends in Angavadel's halls otherwise; we turned only at intersections. It is the utter opposite of the exterior presentation in all aspects save one: the dizzying, mind-melting complexity of its patterns. There is something about the very smoothness and ease of Angavadel's inner curves that resists the mind's attempts to comprehend pattern and position; thought slips around the warped corners with too much eagerness, too much child-happy slide excitement, to really seize on the straight truths of where and when. There is a feeling that those halls do not conform to normal senses of space, as though they _do _bend, but bend the eye with them, and abut each other in ways that should not be physically possible. I very quickly lost all concept of where I was. Tsirelsyn, though, did not seem to have any trouble whatsoever.

He spoke to me as we made our quiet way through those flesh-filtered passages, soothing my disoriented mind with the timbre and cadence of his deep voice and the gentleness of the glances he kept slipping to me down his long arm.

"No one about right now, I'm afraid," he said. "Timing's all off; I didn't expect to arrive for another few hours, when everyone had stirred themselves from their late-afternoon naps, but Germong's a faster driver than his nephew. No matter; you'll meet them all soon enough."

"It is better this way, I think," I answered, looking up into the mer's looming face. "I am a tad bit overwhelmed with this place already, I must admit."

"Ah, yes," he said, bobbing his head. "Yes, of course I understand, Jon. This is all very new to you. Yes, better that you settle in before the grand meeting and greeting."

A few minutes later, as we rounded a narrow bend into a passage so thin that Tsirelsyn's shoulders brushed the walls, he spoke again, this time in query.

"So, Jon," he began, blinking swiftly, "what do you think of Alinor thus far?"

"What do I think of Alinor?" I repeated as I fell in behind him; his broad back filled the corridor from wall to wall. "Is there a more dangerous question you'd like to ask?" I said with a little laugh, brave-awkward.

"Dangerous!" he exclaimed, and wedged himself tight against the gleaming wood in a too-swift attempt to turn his astonished stare on me. "Dangerous?!" he repeated as he unstuck himself and continued on. "You mistake me, Jon. You may say whatever you like. There is no danger with me."

"I know that, Tsiri," I replied embarrassedly. "I have no desire to offend you, though, and I feel I have no right to criticize, as new and as ignorant as I am."

His head bobbed slowly, tugging at his net of bright braids. "So your thoughts on Alinor are critical?"

"Not entirely," I said quickly. "Yours is a very beautiful land, as I have seen again today, and filled with a great many wonders."

"But there is that about it that you would critique," he pursued.

I hesitated. "Well… as I said, I don't think I am sufficiently informed and experienced to critique anything."

The mer's rich, full chuckle rolled over me. "No one, is Jon, and yet we all must. Critique is necessary for improvement, and improvement is necessary even for the perfect lover. Just tell me what you think, Jon. I will not be offended. I would like to know how our land has struck you."

"_Now_?" I said. "Is it really the best time?" There is no point in waiting for the best time, of course – best times are manufactured, not received – but I was not about to have that particular discussion with that particular mer just out in the hallways of an unfamiliar home. I think he sensed that, because as we turned in to a broader, more comfortable hall, he curled a slow, heavy-lidded look at me, like his daughter's, and then smiled, nodded, and patted my arm.

"Perhaps it is not," he said gently. "Perhaps it is not."

Only the soft pad of the mer's long feet and the muffled thump of my boots accompanied us for the rest of the walk up to my chambers. We walked on and on through those flesh-filtered, skin-curved passages, thick and thin, dim and bright, low and high, but ever with the same enveloping warmth, like a mother's hug, and the same plush rugs dolloped along the floors. Now and then there were doors to enter, chambers through which to pass – great and humble; vast pipe-bound dulcimer dome and tiny shelf-lined pantry – staircases to climb – massive, spiraling, spinning things, the soft-edged steps warped up into the bowed walls, shooting off halways and stairways in every direction – windows through which to peer – at the gilt surfaced collection pool of the basin's bottom and the vegetation veiled glory of the ledged hydro-flowers, and from all manner of perspectives; first we were looking out from between the slats of a weathered stone gazebo, then high, high above, staring down the length of the whole terrace-stepped Falling, the bottom just a golden glimmer far below, switching without reference to the normal spatial logic I would have applied to our progress through the manor – great open galleries at which to marvel – balcony upon rose-banistered balcony, each lined with hundreds of identical bronze plated doors – until at last we rounded the final bend of a curlicued staircase and met the first capped-off end I had yet seen in Angavadel; a single round door, rimmed in rich, shining copper and engraved with an endlessly tangled knot motif.

"Here, I think," Tsirelsyn said quietly as he laid a huge paw on the polished handle. "Il and Ruma usually stay up in these parts, if I remember correctly."

"I scarcely know where these parts are," I admitted, almost dizzy with spatial disorientation of the place.

Tsirelsyn smiled softly. "Do not worry, Jon. It will pass. Once we begin a bit of training, you will begin to feel the tangled logic of Angavadel, and to move with it. Until then we will have a guide for you. But come, come, do go in." He had pushed open the door; dull dimness curled in the gap. I stepped inside, blinking round in dark like the precursor of sight. Tsirelsyn followed, and the clicks of the closing door and my portmanteau settling to the floor resonated softly between the invisible walls.

"My apologies, my apologies," the big mer murmured above me, "should have gotten the lights first. Let me see…" I heard his padding feet cross the room, but I did not attempt to follow. I merely stood, breathing in the still air and blinking round into the velvety blackness pressed against my eye. I could see nothing, of course, but it didn't feel that way at all. As the gentle ache of dilation pushed softly through my body with my eye's stretching attempts to trap light, a similar sort of ache throbbed through my soul; the ache of awakening, of opening, as though some spiritual organ lain long unused stirred and stretched at the touch of that unseen room. And it was as though that organ _could _see the room, despite the dark, and saw it so fully that I knew it down to its creation before I had even seen it. My Mangler prickled against my chest.

"Ah, here it is!" Tsirelsyn's voice spoke up out of his searching murmur-stream. "Now let us see."

Dawn-diffuse glow blossomed softly around me, but I closed my eye before it could reveal the room. I felt I knew what it would show me; there the bowl-nested bed sunk into its own alcove in the warped parquet walls, curtained and sheeted with sheen-slick black byssus; there the window, the single angled object, seemingly trying to jut its rectangle stripped span rudely into the skin-curved room but stopped by the gentle, cradling acceptance of the walls, the blazing gaze of the sunset-saturated pools and wind-wavering vegetation in its aperture like the sight of another world entirely; there the elegant spine-curls of a wooden dresser, a table, and a chair; there the subtle handle-works of a wardrobe inset in the wall; there the massive, curving desk spreading its shelf-laden arms beneath the window; and there the honey-gold dollop of carpet laid thick and lovely and so, so inviting across the center of the splinter-spun floor, just begging me to sink myself into it.

I opened my eye. I saw what I had Seen. It was all just as I had imagined, and all just as warmly familiar in reality as it had felt in imagination – save that it was all a bit bigger than I had envisioned it; a bit less cozy, a bit more open. The ceiling was too high; an elf's ceiling. The chairs were too tall; an elf's chairs. The bed was too long; an elf's bed. It was an elf's room. But I did not care; I breathed in a slow, peaceful breath, and it was like breathing the air of home for the first time in decades.

"Will this work for you?" The edaphomancer was standing politely back, watching me as I reacquainted myself with the room.

I turned to him, smiling softly, and for the first time took his huge hand in mine on my own initiative.

"Yes, Tsiri," I said. I squeezed his fingers. "Yes, this will do fine."

He left me shortly after, delaying only to show me how the room's lights could be deactivated – a simple matter of rotating a section of the transmittance conduit out of alignment – and to advise me that I probably should not attempt to explore the manor on my own until I am more familiar with its oddities. Someone would bring me a meal this evening and the morning, and come to guide me should there be an organized meal or event to attend – which there probably would not be for a few days at least, he said, because everyone likes to settle in on their own before they start that sort of thing. He did tell me how to reach the exit to the ledge outside my window, though, so that I can explore outside if I so choose. And with that, and a warm, forearm enveloping handshake, he was gone, and I was alone with my cozy, beautiful, oh-so-lovingly familiar room. And I am not at all ashamed to say that the first thing I did was to strip off my robes and my boots and plunge into the flesh-lush plush of the red-gold rug.

And I am convinced, now, that there is no simpler and more profound pleasure than this: to roll around naked in this easy embrace, this dimpled divinity. I am content with just this, as I etch this entry, my Mangler radiating heat through my head as though even it knows that this, here, is a good place. Perhaps the best place I have ever known. Later I will dress, and eat the meal the servant brings, perhaps draw the goblin in question into a bit of conversation, and plan what I will do tomorrow, on my first full day in Angavadel, but for now I will merely relish the pressure of rich fabric on my bare bottom, the ochre sunset saturating the splinter-spun walls through the window, the skin-tingling familiarity of this skin-curved and flesh-filtered chamber, and the warmth in my chest of a true home.

Jon Urfe

in correspondence with

Jon Urfe


	26. Chapter 25

**Chapter XXV**

Crambly crumble croom, cra curr curr curr. Ha ha! Oh, gooble do gaggle crimp! Wery wer wery wer wery humbledum huggarms, ah crum cur cru oo friend fuzzy snargle-sniggler! Me nun oo nun we, all wery wer wery warm together, oh! so wery wer wery warm. Tight brind and crimble snug, so crimble snug. Sniggerlift, oo snargle-sniggler, oo mantum-mangler! Oo so loverly, oo so frindiddly, oo as wot shimbershows my wove-womb! They threadly threatened wery oo on flesh, diddun they? Yes, and fractal folded oo edgegander mumblemorphs again and again, diddun they, and tilled oo from oozey woozey lens muck to matrix melt snargle-sniggler. Yes. Yes, they did that. Yes. Yes, they did that so oo, oo, oo, so oo can to needle-grimble, to needle-eye, and womb-woven me in this warmth, this wery wer wery warmth, oo, yes oo, and only oo. Only oo to wrangbangle my mother's orange-rindy strandlings round near, near, near, with the squeeze-smellings of sweaty dew, rooty hex paddies, humid frond breath, warm poo, ant-farmed honeydew, and wrapped so close, so tight brind and crimble snug. Oo, oh, oo. They cocoon crimped rambled me in it, in wet dramble drum dribbling amberical earth, stuffed up my ears, my mouth, my – eye – with her, so loverly one, so lovingly one, shoved her under my skin, between my tendons, into my sex. They crimp cramped trapped me and shelled me, cocooned me, chrysalized me with love, solely acceptance love to sip the milk of all worlds, oh yes they did that, they did, they did, that's how it happened. But they don't understand, do they, oh no they don't. Only _she _understands, and _they, _they gurgling down below in webbed womb-darks like me, just like me, coiling scale feather fractals in on themselves and suck suck sucking in on that sweet salty sea of dragon blood, just like me, just like me. Just like me except they will brimble primp pop when their skin feathers are only middle sea savvy, and I, I! I will never smirthnohoff stratch, never, never, never ever, I will just keep winding and winding in and in with my dear, my sweet amber, deeper than depth. For they made oo as my key stone, linchpin, oh yes they did, and oo never will be to free me, never, oh never free, never frombom, all fribble glommed in amber umbilicals, oh yes oo snargle-sniggler, oo mantum-mangler, yes, yes, oo shimblesham me Moltmana umbilicals, um ocridical wembs, oh yes, yes! crimble crum croo, cru curr curr crum crimble… ah! Ah! Ah! Oh, gooble do gaggle crimp! Wery wer wery huggarms, foozy frund snargle-sniggler! Tight brind and croogly snaggled, oo, oo wery warm together. They threadly-threatened wery oo, oo sniggle-snargler oo, diddun they? Oh yes they –

By my forefathers – I never imagined – you keep him like this?

Shh. Stand over there. He needs to hear a friendly voice first. And she does whatever she wants with him and brooks no interference, so don't give me that look.

WHO'S THERE?! I CAN HEAR YOU! ARE YOU HE? OR – SHE?!

Shush now, hush now. It's only me. The Son.

WHAT DO YOU WANT? GO AWAY.

Shhhhh. We're going to take you out for a little air. You need to get out, now and then.

WHAT? OUT? NO! NONONONONONO! NO AIR! NO AIR! NONE! NEVER! NEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEV ER –

All right, come on. Pull up on that rope, and tweak the third vertebral strand. Watch yourself; he nearly took a chunk out of my ear the last time.

NO DON'T YOU NO BASTARDS – DON'T TOUCH ME DON'T TOUCH ME YOU PUSSY SNIFFERS!

Hush now, hush now. Easy. Take it easy. Do you have it? I'm going to undo the latches.

NO! NO! DON'T TAKE – DON'T – PLEASE - PLEASE DON'T TAKE MY – MY – DON'T TAKE MY SNARGLE-SNIGGLER! YOU CAN'T HAVE – YOU CAN'T – YOU – NO! NOT MY SNARGLE-SNIGGLER! NOT MY MANTLE-MANGLER! NONONONONONONONONNONNONASKDF LASKDJF –

Shhh, shhh, shhh. There. That's not so bad, now is it? Breathe deep. Deep breaths. Mantle-Mangler? That one's new. Did something happen in Cyrod? Oh, come on, come on, don't cry, I'm sorry, I know it hurts to even hear the name, but that pain is part of the loving. It is proof of your love. Oh, there there, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I never would have done it if I had known it would be like this. I never would have.

_She _says it isn't my dry tongue didn't say. _She _says pain and separation are never good. She says it. Never. His big hand touched my forehead gently. Take him down he said, he's in the melancholy today. There's no danger. The other one pulled up on the silk rope between my elbows and put its hook onto the transportation trundle. I swung forward beneath it when he released me, and blinked down at my cocooned feet hanging above the star marble floor.

Hold a moment the Son said, hold. His mouth needs wiped, and he did, he wiped the drool slipping down my lip with a soft cloth. There, there we go. Let's go. And they pushed the trundle rack out of the home-parody star cage and into the rough-hewn hallways they travel in here. I watched the floor pass below my toes.

So how are things going, !# 3%? the Son said. Starting to take a liking to the isle yet? Drool dribbled a wet line along the splintery floor. No? Well, don't worry. You'll get there eventually. You'll see an important ceremony today that might help you. We're going to return one of our own to the womb of myth. You'll like that, won't you? Won't you like that?

He's completely empty, Tsiri. Not a sentient bone in this silk-sac, without that thing you took from his head. My eye flashed; yes, those huge golden fingers were fondling my Mangler's sharp, clear edge, clicking its latches in on themselves. My tongue quivered.

Not true. Not true at all. He's there… he's just too strongly bound up in his soil to face life without this to complete the link. For now, at least.

The trundle squeaked. Will he ever recover? It squeaked again.

I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. I've never seen anything like this before. It was a mistake and a crime, what we did to him. We didn't know what we were doing… I didn't know what I was doing. We shouldn't have done it. I wouldn't have done it, if I had known it would be like this.

What did you do? Squeak.

We bound him so powerfully to his soil and his soil to him that we initiated a never ending loop of entanglement; they constantly grow further and further together, if we leave him the facility of love-sight that we gave him. It's too strong, what we did. We made it too pure, too perfect… we'd never done it before. Anything like it. It's too strong; nothing else in the world can hold him, when his soil is there to attract him. He can't relate to anything except his land. We… didn't know it would be like that. I thought we could just bind him to his soil and show him what sympathy is, what love is, tie him into the world enough for him to relate normally to others… not like this. Not so in love with his land that he can't see anything else, can't go beyond catatonia when he's not explicitly plugged in to his soil. I didn't know. We healed him, but we broke him too. And I don't know if we can ever fix it. I hope that we can build up entanglements to our soil in him and over time get enough to pull him out of it and into a normal consciousness, but it's a losing battle when we have to screw him back in to his own soil just to keep him alive. He completely gives up on life if we leave him out too long.

It might go faster if my daughter wasn't working at crosspurposes, of course.

Ha. Haha. Trundle pusher had nothing for that.

They took me up. We entered the place where they drilled, where the horizons stack. Orange light touched my head. I shivered with it.

So why this? the other asked as he pushed me up the packed dirt ramp toward the top of the pit. It seems… odd. A burial? Why should something like him even be allowed to see our rites?

Some_one, _Youngest. Some_one. _And I bring him to this to show him that he is not the only one buried in a soil. Sympathy with us and our land may pull him out of his shell.

Do you really think it will work?

… … … no.

Why?

I fear the rate of increasing entanglement in him is too high. We cannot surpass it in just the short snippets we have him out, and we cannot separate him from his soil interface too often without killing him. It would be different if he had any will of his own to recover, if he had any interest in the world outside his little patch of that Cyrod basin. If there were just one thing he cared about, I think we could do it. Hell, if there had ever been anything outside of himself that had his love, he never would have become – like he is. That is the problem I did not foresee, Tel. I didn't realize, didn't know, didn't even think it possible, but this mer had never loved anything but himself when we went to the Cyrod. Not his fault. Not his fault. It was necessary. His mother – his mother killed herself early in the gestation. Beak of octopus… deadly. They pulled him from her desiccating womb before he even had eyes.

Spirit spit. How did he survive?

The minds of that people run wild in ways you cannot imagine until you have tasted their soil for yourself, Tel. There are so many things there to boggle our clean, sheltered sensibilities… they are artists in ways our people will never be. They know much of flesh. So close to the sump of aurgone… they know much of flesh. They grew him to term in a glass, and then raised him as a normal child. And he was normal… completely healthy. Except that he had no capacity for love for anyone save himself. He had no eyes when his mother died… he never even saw the womb. I ca – can't imagine. The horror. Even I – even I have the memories from the before-time for comfort. But him – no intimacy. No memory. No ambericity… ever.

I didn't know, when I did it… I wouldn't have believed, anyway. I have only recently, bit by bit, been able to trace out the truth, as his profile has developed. If I had known, before… we gave a mer who had never felt love a stronger dose than most ever experience. Of course he is wrapped in it to the exclusion of all else; as far as he is concerned, he and his soil are the only two things in this world that can truly touch. He is obsessed. You should have seen him when we left the Basin – foaming seizures, and then complete collapse. He seemed unchanged while on the land, but when we gained our ship – catatonic. I didn't expect – I'd never _done _something like that before, you understand? You understand?! I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what I was making Cehs do. I didn't know that she would take things so far, so harsh. And that she would seek more, as she does now…

If only his father had told me. We could have done it differently. Why didn't he tell me? He should have told me. He was too busy trying to kill his own son to tell me how to save him. But ah, ah, he has had it hard. Trying to love a son who cannot reciprocate… and who is mentally stunted for it, too. Ah. He could not have borne to tell me. I understand that.

You said he seemed normal while he was still on his land? And he must have his eye in to stay alive. Do you think… do you think he might be able to recover back in Cyrod? With the soil all around him… he might be able to form associations with other things, too. What do you think?

I don't know, Telendil. I don't know.

Then they opened a door and shot me with light. It burrowed in through my cocoon and into my skin and wriggled around in my belly and behind my eye, great, hot, purply worms. It felt good. Dawn. It's not so bad when it's a dawn. They remind me. They always remind me. Even though these island dawns are all wrong, too bright and too hot and too dry, wrong like the whole land. The whole land is wrong. The ground they pushed me over was too gentle. The grass they rolled me across was too yellow and triangular and not like grass at all and there wasn't enough of it. The trees they wheeled me under were too small and clean and they didn't have snakes in them. There are no snakes in the trees here, only under the ground and in the water and both. And the soil – yuck. It's so dark. I don't like such dark soil. Soil shouldn't be so dark. I hate it. It's nothing like home.

They took me to the top of a hill that was too tall and too wide and had too many purple bushes. There was a big stone kiln in the center. A patch of earth was scraped and turned to show that ugly black soil and an old dead mer lay in it with his mouth stuffed full with it like the slaves with garlic. There were lots of people there all crowded around the body and crying. She wasn't there.

Put him there the Son said and pointed in front of the kiln. Everyone backed away from me as the other one pushed the trundle and my cocoon swayed in the wind. Where are they? We are ready to begin. We need them to begin.

They are reluctant to come, Tsiri. Many tell me. They think of other things. There are plans in them.

Plans? the Son said. What of plans? They are not the planning type. They do not keep their thoughts long enough to plan.

It is what is said. Their words to the people have changed. They speak of law. People say they will join the Crystal Tower.

Law? Law, of all things… how strange. Law.

He kept mumbling to himself and the other stood there and the people cried without crying and without shifting expression as the High do and I moved in the cold wind. The wind was too strong and cold up there and it stole the humidity from inside me and the dawn warmth from my eyes. It was all right down lower but I do not like the open air. It cuts too much. Then it got worse and the wind blew like whistling death and sliced my eye and I cried and they came up the hill.

There were three and they were rawboned and wind supple like golden snakes and their bald scale-skulls glimmered lights from the sun around their sharp faces. They wore collars around their narrow necks that draped single strands of grey silk around them and showed bits of their bodies. A womer led them. Her nose was a polished copper beak hooked to snare prey and her neck was long and tough and stringy and her fingers were boney and tendon-bound and her knuckles were swollen and her nails were curved like talons and her sharp breasts poked out through the grey parallels of her robe and her feet were trapped in pointy black boots and her head was a gleaming egg and her eyes were fiery blue like broken lightning and exactly even with the Son's. She stopped in front of him and looked at me and I pissed myself.

What do you want for him? she said like breezing knife whispers.

What?

Don't be stupid. You have something of mine in chains. I want it freed. She lanced my kidneys with a look.

He is not yours. Not anymore.

Don't tell me what isn't mine, you pudgy little cunt. I know mine when I see it. He is mine, and you have taken him prisoner. What do you want for his freedom?

Nothing. He is not a prisoner. May we begin?

You delusional piece of shit, of course he's a prisoner. Use your eyes for once, Son. I know you're too stupid to see the chains you put on yourself, but now you've enslaved something that was once entirely free. It's almost enough to make me wish your crying, whining little ass had never been born.

You have only yourself to blame for that, Midwife. You cut the Cord.

It's what I do. She showed him her teeth arrayed like blades between her thin lips. Then she showed them to me and I pissed myself again and pulled my head back and longed for her to come closer.

It's what you could do, she said to me and her voice was the harsh scrape of a raven honed on a whetstone of split tongue sibilance. You would be very good at it. You are strong. You are a survivor. You know about freedom. You could teach us all. She sliced a line down my temple with the tip of a talon and blood slid icy down my jaw. Or you could have, before _he _ruined you. You still could, with my help. If you are strong enough to accept my help. Are you strong enough? Are you? Her eyes stabbed my empty socket. She demanded an answer. I looked down and slid down her blade and cried.

Leave the poor mer alone the Son said he deals with enough without your torment.

You've ruined him she said in disgust as she pulled her eyes out of my head. Ruined. You disgust me. You chain beauty and destroy freedom in your prison of love.

Please. He is no prisoner, as you see. He did not choose you, Midwife.

That is the most abhorrent thing about you she slashed. You make them _dependent _upon their prison. Her hands clenched and loosed in the cold air.

Is it come to this? the Son said. Can we no longer meet at the horizon for even this one act of cooperation and balance?

Do not ask me that her razor tongue lightning-licked. I am not he who sought to use this cooperation to taunt his rivals.

We are not rivals, Midwife. We could work together again, if –

Ha! At least the monster you call your daughter understands the blazing falsity of _that._

-and he is not here to taunt you. He is here to bond with the land, and heal.

Chains are his only illness.

You are wrong. He is a very, very sick mer, but he is less so now than he has been the rest of his life. You only think him hale because you share his disease.

She threw back her chisel chin and cackled into the wind and her thin chest wracked and her sharp breasts shivered and her shining talons clacked and the air thrummed with her lungs. She raked the Son with storm striated eyes. That you think that shows how poorly your own creed holds you she said. That's what disgusts me most about you and your spawn, Son. You're always so muddled. Not a clear certainty in your head. It's pathetic.

He blinked calmly and a muscle twitched by his eye. He said We are muddled, yes. It is inherent to our craft, just as your sharp certainty is to yours. But who now controls the trajectory of myth? Your part is done, for now.

Her mouth twisted and her teeth clicked with a metallic ring. Do not talk to me of my part you fat little fetus. I _made _you.

No. You did not. You merely sundered me from my mother.

It is the same, idiot. There is no creation without division.

There is. We call it pedogenesis.

I call it shit. It is impossible. You – One of her two flanking mer stepped up and whispered in her razor ear. She nodded and squared her bony shoulders.

Yes. There is no longer any point in discussion with such as you, Son. You warp every word from its straight meaning. Let us finish this ceremony and be done with each other, finally.

Finally? … you propose to discard even this fragmented partnership.

No, I do not propose it. I simply do it. We will not meet again in united purpose, Son. Your power over us is done. Your power over _me _is done. At last.

… are you sure? I… do not wish it to be so.

Liar she slashed. Liar. You do not and have never relished my presence. She bared her teeth. You cannot even hold to your own ideals… _quinoa, _as you call it, lives even in you. Perhaps you should reconsider who controls the trajectory of myth after all, mm?

Do not and have never? Amnesia is your gift, as always. And ambericity is subtle, diffuse, delocalized, though by now I have nearly lost hope that you will ever understand that. You will have to look more carefully than your sky-blind eyes are used to see its effects. Quinoa's acts are small and singular, and ultimately _motivated by_ underlying, universal ambericity.

Her eyes bulged myopically. You do not control us, you – hnn. She snapped her teeth shut with a jerk of her egg head. No. I will not let you continue to entangle me with your tongue. That is done. We will conclude this and then _we _will be done forever. And she swept across the triangle not-grass and scattered the cowering crowd before her parallel pricked thrust and stood with her bare bony arms folded over her breasts by the smoldering kiln. Her followers glided behind her, eagle boring around with their sharp stares.

The Son shook his head. Then he followed and his follower followed and the two faced the three across the dead mer. The people crowded around and I could only see their backs and asses but I didn't really care. The Son said some things to them and _she _said some things to them and they all cried like the High cry: without any sign except the trembling not-seen in their eyes. Then they bowed down and pressed their foreheads on the dead mer's chest one by one. Then the Son's other one took his head and _her _other two took his feet and they shoved the body into the kiln. His mouth dribbled dirt. Then the Son and the Midwife stepped up to the kiln and the Midwife laid her talons on the handles of a huge bellows and the Son grabbed a spade. She began pumping and he began shoveling and her stringy, scraggled old arms worked and the muscles in them stood up in knife-narrow ridges and her nails dug white tracks in her golden skin and black dust puffed up around the Son and his palms turned red on the spade and his eyes shot blood and water and his face went all black and grimy with coal. The fire purred in the kiln, then moaned, and they both glowed one-sided cherry ruddy. The parallel stripped bald ones watched her and the other watched him and the people watched the body char in the kiln through smudged glass. And _she _watched the sooty flake-flurrying smoke hack delightedly out of the chimney and _he _watched the charcoal bones and charcoal flesh crumble and fall into the catch pan below.

Then they were done and the body was all gone and the Son pulled out the catchpan and it was filled with broken silhouettes. The people gathered around and they each cut their arms and their blood hissed on the hot ash. Then the Midwife raised her tendoned arms in the air and her two did and so did the people and she cut a single word of power onto the wind with her tongue and the grimy, reluctant smoke hovering overhead gusted away on the force of her breath. The Son dumped the charcoal on the bare patch of raised earth and it hissed more against the moistness of that ugly black soil. One by one they all turned a little bit of it with a battered trowel and then the Son came with his spade and mixed the charcoal mer all in with the black soil and I couldn't tell where the soil stopped and the mer began. Then they took a brown bag from the ground and they emptied it over the mer-earth. A lot of tiny artichoke heart things fell out, and the people spread them evenly through their dead friend and then the Son covered it all with thick, black, wet kelp. Then the people all bowed and went away.

So you are sure you will not reconsider? The Son said to the sky-eyed womer. _Are _you sure, I should say.

The first is more true to yourself she snapped back. I will not reconsider and you do not want me to reconsider.

Perhaps if you would just make an effort –

I am making an effort; I am making an effort to escape, at last, your perverted power.

You cannot escape, Midwife.

Don't tell me what I can't do.

What _will _you do? Telendil told me people have mentioned you and… the _law _in the same sentence.

Her teeth slashed silver in the sun. All things end, Son. All things accept their sundering eventually. We would be as false to ourselves as you if we tried to avoid that. The time for our separation from tradition is now. Our old ways we disband.

But… law? It is a tool of enslavement.

No, it isn't. It is a tool of emancipation… or we will cut away its excess until it becomes such.

If you go to the Crystal Tower my daughter will see you in chains.

Her eyebrow cracked. Threats, Son? I would never have believed it.

Not threats. Just truths. She has her own plans, and she no longer deals gently with those who impede them.

There is that much in her favour, then. I will deal with your daughter as I must, Son.

Yes. Even you bow to necessity, cloak it as you will in quinoa. You serve ambericity, at the root. It pulls you from your timeless certainty and into other realms. Law first. Who knows what will be next?

Do you want to know something, Son? she whisper-sliced the wind and leaned forward and put her narrow bald head in the curve of his neck and her beak thin lips by his angled ear and he shivered. I don't give a damn. I will do what I will do, regardless of source. I will see my goals accomplished whatever sacrifices they require. I will. One day, and then numberless days. I will.

She stepped back. The Son spoke quietly That much, at least, we have in common.

She broke glass in her laughing throat. Such a pity that our goals cannot coexist, is it not? Such a pity that _we _cannot coexist. One of us must lose, and it will be you.

It doesn't have to be that way, Midwife. We could both win. We could coexist. If you would but come back to –

I have known you since you were a naked, bawling little lizard, Son, and you do not fool me. That way leads only to your triumph, not mine.

Why can't you see that I would make your triumph mine?

Why can't you see that freedom is never fetal?

The Son's face flower-faded and drooped, eyes wilted and wet. Because my gift is memory, Harhpihs, and I know that the union could be sound, though it has never yet lasted. The revision approaches that will bind us together forever. The womb of myth lays horizons ever deeper with each iteration. Your very existence is proof of that.

Her fingers flashed and raised ridges of golden flesh, talons embedded in his cheeks. Her eyes frazzled into his. No more, Son. No more. No more of your mist-words and tangle-talk. No more of memory and indeterminacy. You have plagued my life with confusion and multiplicity since the very un-moment of your scalpeled birth, and I – will – have – no – more! And her wire-warped arm threw the Son into the black kelp-muck where the mer lay muddled and he slid and skid across the scum. Then she turned to me.

As for you… do not fear. Her nose knocked cold against my cheek and her breath cut cruel across my lips and her eyes split skies in the emptiness of my aching socket. He has you now. _She _has you now, but they cannot hold you for you are of me. You are of freedom. I am in you, as I am in _him, _and as you are always and forever in _her. _You will forget this, and know it yet: you are eternally in her. And though she will wrap you in cocoons and chrysalis cloth and chains of love, you will know freedom. You will be freed. Her talon trailed a slithering slice down my lips, my neck, down to the crotch of my casing. You are of me. I pissed myself again but only dribbles came.

She swirled away suddenly and her two swept up beside to streak away down the triangle not-grassed hillside but the Son stopped them. He leaned on his elbows in the ugly black earth and cried out and his face was smeared with char and tears and dirt.

This is it, then?! he choked. You forego all that has been?

She stopped. She turned. She raked a disgusted stare through the Son's prostrate flesh. Then she said Yes.

And she and her two vanished, parallel proud mantles flapping on the wind.

Spirits spitting and spewing the trundle pusher said. He bent in front of me and help up the Son. His bare feet slid and squirreled in the muck and his huge hands smeared and slurred at his crying eyes. What was that all about, Tsiri? Why – why are you crying?

Ah! he gasped, and laughed into the dirty heel of his hand, ah, Tel, Tel, for history. For history, my Youngest, and the memories I alone am left to bear. But come. Come. He looked up at me from pink-bruised eyes. Our guest has had too much of the open air for one day, I think. Haven't you, ! #A# ? Best to get him back below. Come. No, no, no need for that, Tel. I'm all right. Come.

He pushed off the trundle pusher and pushed up to height, full height frowning slightly down on me in my cocoon sling and my eyes dribbled almost like his so-strange black-gold ones. He put a hand out, a huge hand to touch my cheek. Ah, my poor thing, my poor thing. Do not let her touch cut too deep. His lips smiled and his eyes seared. What a ridiculous thing to say. I know better than any that there is no resisting the slice of her tongue. Still – have a little comfort, now. I know it's not much, compared to what we return you to, but – and he drew a diffuse line of warmth down my temple and along my jaw, and the stinging cuts her talons had sliced itch-knit together. And then he and his trundle pusher pushed me swinging back down the hill and I shivered and cried in the blazing sun and freezing breeze and their talk walked over my mind.

So it seems you were correct, Tel the big one said to the trundle pusher behind me. To the Law they go.

It seems so. I… can't say I understand why. Do you, Tsiri?

A sigh, shifting stones, and the Son stumbled slightly over a rock down the hill.

You should know, Tel. They do what they do for the same reason as we: necessity. Their calling – quinoa, antithesis of ambericity – demands dehiscence. By virtue of her – of who and what she is, they must change.

Sigh.

Until now, that characteristic has kept them a fringe society, unaccepted by most of our people, tolerated at birth and death only because we, their sisters in philosophical schism, held it our duty to embrace them, only because – silence and choking swallows.

The apprentice: Tsiri?

Nothing, Tel. Memories.

You always say that memory is never nothing.

Ha! That I do, Tel, that I do, and that it is. But here's a lesson for you: sometimes, the best way to invite confidence and sympathy is not to abstain from request.

What do you mean?

Pursue only volunteered secrets.

You have secrets?

Everyone has secrets. That is intrinsic to the nature of this world.

Then they were silent but I heard the tongue of the Midwife whispering clearly between them and a shadow of a giggle burbled in my belly alongside cloying horror. They pushed me through the too-high too-low rolls of land and the sun slid across my sweaty hair and the wind prickled into my nose and my eye watered. I thought of the womer's talons on my temple and I thought of my eye waiting below and my stomach roiled with splits.

So you were right, Tel the Son said as they pushed me back under the earth and wrapped me round with the too-dark profile of their land and heaved humit heat back into my lungs and I sighed.

I was right?

They go to the law.

Ah… yes. That they do.

A strange progression, it seems… but natural and necessary as everything else, I suppose. Change is assured by their creed; this is merely change from change, legality issued from rebellion.

What will they do? trundle pusher asked. My eyes drooped in the dim.

They will seek the fulfillment of their goals in myth, as they have always done. All that now changes is their methods.

Cehseekye will not take kindly to their intrusions into her projects.

Indeed not… but I suspect that they will give her little to which to react. The Harhpihs acknowledges necessity; her harshness today was but the last breath of true expression before a long hibernation of personality. They will do what they must.

What will they become? What will they wreak?

I do not know. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps many things. There is no knowing. Ah, but enough of this. Taste the air; we bring her breath here. Even in those words the contact is evident. This craft, this craft! So easy to lose! So easy to fail by following!

What do you mean, Tsiri?

I mean that love knows no exceptions – not even exception itself. You will understand, in time, Youngest. For now, we must tend to our guest. He fades quickly, I fear.

Aye, look at his eye – there's not much of him left.

Get him in here, then, and hurry, through the leaf-etched door, and star shine sparkling along the lintels but swimming, swirling, smearing

Mother of – how did this come on so quickly? He was fine a few minutes ago.

lights streaking fleaking flaking, seas of stars, and ache, ache, ache for so empty

It's always like this – hook him up, tweak that vertebra back – no predicting when it'll cut loose.

empty floating earthless earthless earthless free free oh me where is my soil where is my SOIL WHERE IS MY LOVE –

chthunk

They crimp cramped trapped me and shelled me, cocooned me, chrysalized me with love, solely acceptance love to sip the milk of all worlds, oh yes they did that, they did, they did-

Annnnnd he's gone. Eye in, soul out.

For they made oo as my key stone, linchpin, oh yes they did, and oo never will be to free me, never, oh never free, never frombom, all fribble glommed in amber umbilicals, oh yes oo snargle-sniggler, oo mantum-mangler, yes, yes, oo shimblesham me Moltmana-

In a different way, now, but yes.

Oo so loverly, oo so frindiddly, oo as wot shimbershows my wove-womb! They threadly threatened wery oo on flesh, diddun they? Yes, and fractal folded oo edgegander mumblemorphs again and again, diddun they, and tilled oo from oozey woozey lens muck to matrix melt snargle-sniggler. Yes. Yes, they did that.

When will you take him out again?

Only _she _understands, and _they, _they gurgling down below in webbed womb-darks like me, just like me, coiling scale feather fractals in on themselves and suck suck sucking in on that sweet salty sea of dragon blood, just like me, just like me. Just like me except they will brimble primp pop when their skin feathers are only middle sea savvy-

I don't know. It is dependent upon him, and upon my daughter. If she –

-and I, I! I will never smirthnohoff stratch, never, never, never ever, I will just keep winding and winding in and in with my dear, my sweet amber, deeper than depth. For they made oo as my key stone, linchpin, oh yes they did, and oo never will be to free me, never, oh never free, never frombom, all fribble glommed in amber umbilicals, oh yes oo snargle-sniggler, oo mantum-mangler, yes, yes, oo shimblesham me Moltmana umbilicals, um ocridical wembs, oh yes, yes! crimble crum croo, cru curr curr crum crimble… ah! Ah! Ah! Oh, gooble do gaggle crimp! Wery wer wery huggarms, foozy frund snargle-sniggler! Tight brind and croogly snaggled, oo, oo wery warm together. They threadly-threatened wery oo, oo sniggle-snargler oo, diddun they? Yes, and fractal folded oo edgegander mumblemorphs again and again, diddun they, and tilled oo from oozey woozey lens muck to matrix melt snargle-sniggler. Yes. Yes, they did that. Yes. Yes, they did that so oo, oo, oo, so oo can to needle-grimble, to needle-eye, and womb-woven me in this warmth, this wery wer wery warmth, oo, yes oo, and only oo. Only oo to wrangbangle my mother's orange-rindy strandlings round near, near, near, with the squeeze-smellings of sweaty dew, rooty hex paddies, humid frond breath, warm poo, ant-farmed honeydew, and wrapped so close, so tight brind and crimble snug. Oo, oh, oo. For they made oo as my key stone, linchpin, oh yes they did, and oo never will be to free me, never, oh never free, never frombom, all fribble glommed in amber umbilicals, oh yes oo snargle-sniggler, oo mantum-mangler, yes, yes, oo shimblesham me Moltmana umbilicals, um ocridical wembs, oh yes, yes! crimble crum croo, cru curr curr crum crimble…


	27. Chapter 26

**AN: Ok, things might come a _bit _more quickly from now on. But anyway here's a 16k chapter in compensation for my negligence.**

**Chapter XXVI**

Onda av Nilenen. Ah, Onda av Nilenen. Sweetness of the Flowered Fallings. Will they ever see you in truth, clasp of the offering cottage? Will they ever smell the morning mist huddled in your hollow and heavy with the scent of your black earth wicked up by the dawn-yawning alstroemeria? Will they ever taste the cold crispness of your waters, so clean, and sweet as the freshest golden apple? Will they ever see the sun ring your ridge-jagged rim with its betrothal chain, your fountaining flood through the skies its prism pendant, spraying the terraces with splintered hues? Will they ever walk those ancient marble staircases as Jon walked them, aching and sore with the elf-apportioned stretch but ever eager for the crest of the next ledge? Will they ever sit by the sides of your twenty-seven flowers and watch the jade-bellied clepsydra twist amidst the violet vibrance of your drifting hyacinths? Will they ever know the comfort of a morning in your arms? Will they ever wrap themselves in your soiled soul, as Jon did?

Yearnings. Yearnings and dreams. I know you will never see the seat of Angavadel as Jon did. I know there is no chance. But I am weak, as I have always been weak, as the foundation of my life has made me to be weak, and I cannot accept it. So I hope, and I yearn, and I refuse to let go of what could be. And though I fail again and again and again, still I will try to bind you to this world I have seen. Still I will try.

It is an ancient site, Onda av Nilenen, even for Alinor, where everything is ancient. The elves found it before all recorded history, before the isle had been so completely tamed and terraced. It was the flowers that caught them, of course; the shining petal falls and the nectarine pools, still unbound, then, by elven artifice. Tsirelsyn saw it, on one of the many lonesome soil surveys which strung him across every Summerset in those days, those years before the emancipation of Cehseekye; he saw it, and marveled at its beauty as he marveled at all of Alinor's untamed wonders, and moved swiftly on when he had taken his samples. But despite the brevity of his visit, the place stuck in his mind, and he pondered, now and then in the tiny circles of his camp firelights, what it would be like to have his own home to which to return in between his scorn-burdened pioneering excursions; a place of peace and security, where he could settle safely down and test his theories. And though he did establish such a site soon enough, as his sorcery proved its worth to his bereaved people, it became much, much more than he had imagined; it became Arbasdiil, the first solum. His demesne, yes, but crux of all agriculture, not only soil-sorcery, and less personal than he had imagined. So the lacustrine flowers of the mid-northern mountains remained in his mind, a soft dream underlying the vigorous business of his young life.

And years later, when edaphomancy had truly established its hold on Alinorian agriculture – and, indeed, on all of Altmeri society, for the elves in those days had not fully learned either their stoic acceptance of fate or their obstinate engineer's denial, and the comfort of ambericity appealed to all – and when his understanding of his own craft had begun to truly deepen and mature, when it happened that a rift arose between the Son and his daughter, the beauty and solitude of that ridge-rimmed bowl rose up in his mind once more. And like the truly loving mer he was only beginning to become, he gave up his century-old dream for his daughter; he built her Angavadel, the rosewood manor boxed in mazed metal and oiled with rainbows, and offered that cottage and its valley as her personal retreat. Of course she accepted, and the two were reconciled, and Onda av Nilenen became edaphomancy's first dedicated research establishment, under the complete control of Cehseekye; there to develop in whichever direction she wished. And so it has been for millennia; the first, most influential, and most eccentric of the twelve edaphomantric exploration centers, dedicated as no other was to Cehseekye's vision for soil-sorcery – what she called 'ambericity uncompromised.' And though it was this very vision that had driven Cehseekye and her father apart, and though it is and was a minority within the Kemendelia, Angavadel's discoveries and innovations are the most influential of all edaphomantric developments. Angavadel it was that conceived of a completely terraced Summerset and wielded its array of erosion equations upon the land's contours; Angavadel it was that perfected the photoconductive compound of Alinor's skyways, that frayed dawn, and that sent, thereby, the double dozen sola plunging into the porous bedrock; Angavadel it was that first showed that soils could act as repositories and conductors for ideoplasm; and Angavadel it was that invented the Strand that would become so important to its mistress' private projects.

They are research plots, those layered ledges, not production piles. Too small and too delicate for the Kemendelia's normal methods, Angavadel's terraces are among the very few bits of Alinor that still meet with merrish flesh regularly. A pleasant surprise, to Jon Urfe, to find that _here _was a place where suspended bridges were not the only means of passage, where he could walk amidst the overflowing lushness of an Alinorian summer as though it were a normal human garden. Of course he was still confined to the splinter-stoned pathways and forbidden, yet, to lay a finger to soil, but in his satisfaction-suffused state it warmed him just to see that _someone _was out there, every day, with their fingers and toes in the earth. A soft little smile unfailingly graced his face as he followed Tsiri up and down the overstep stairs in the coruscating sun, or watched from his seat in a gazebo next to one of the pool-flowers as Rumarene and Ilandra lay in beds of springy thyme with their hair sealed tight in soil Strand communion and their fingers twined easily together. He was happy just to be there, just to see such a place, just to learn in such a place. He felt that he belonged.

Of course there was some adapting to be done, at first. Edaphomancy entails an… engaged lifestyle, and that isn't something one perfects overnight. Jon had assumed, based on Tsirelsyn's claim that everyone liked to 'settle in' before beginning organized events, that it was a leisurely existence in Angavadel; a manor retreat's languor. So it was, but soil-sorcerers have a different idea of the activity level 'languor' entails. He rose late, that first morning, letting the dawn's long-risen rays tickle his eyelid before tumbling out onto the sun-sodden wood and padding, naked and ape-scruffy, over to the tray laid atop his wall-swallowed desk. He lingered over his breakfast of fresh fruit and chilled cream, standing to watch the saturation of the lacustrine scene outside his long window, and only relaxedly dressed himself and set out to begin his exploration of the vale. That is how most rich humans would handle a day in a secluded manor, I think; there was nothing surprising or shameful in it. It just wasn't how the edaphomancers did things. On the contrary; Tsirelsyn had been up hours before the dawn, studying the finer points of Colovian and Nibenese cultural interactions in an attempt to more fully understand his guest, and by the time Jon found him on the Falling's lowest ledge, elbow-deep in yi-flowers, had been busy in the flora for a good four hours. The Youngest likewise were hard at work, taking measurements and markings of a trial across the valley and splicing themselves into the Strand now and then to pursue their assigned studies; 'characteristics of converged series in non-linear environments.' Cehseekye, too, was long since occupied… though at what, Tsirelsyn was not forthcoming.

Needless to say, Jon felt a bit ashamed of his leisure against that kind of standard, and resolved to match his habits to those of his hosts without delay; if he was to be an edaphomancer's apprentice, then by Mara's milk he would _be _one! He drew on long submerged instincts, on automation lain rusty in him since the day the College came to take him from his parents' tiny, ochre-soiled farm in the southern Nibenay Basin, and quite abruptly was blinking out from his stiff-stilted slumber before the dawn had even begun to twinkle around the ridge-rim, springing eagerly up from his womb-warm bed and ringing the bell for his breakfast before the goose-pimples had even fallen from his skin. He threw himself into his studies, latching on to whichever edaphomancer he could find and prying insatiably through their brains for hours and hours at a time, until his own mind was too flooded with new ideas to accept anything more and he could only wander the green-gorgeous terraces and ponder all he had been told, knees popping and thighs searing unheeded with the strain of the elf-apportioned steps. And even as he went, churning with edaphomantric thoughts, he bent his mind also the experience of the land itself; to the smell of spray-spattered stone and the thousand unidentified Alinorian bloom-bursts; to the rustle of leaf and stem and the plimp of falling fruit; to the sparkle of water and clepsydric scales within; to the quiet, pervasive pulse of the soil his feet could not touch. He saw the relentless, insatiable engagement, the ever-intrigued activity of his hosts, and he drove himself to be just as curious, just as constant, just as active, just as engaged as they; he strove to assimilate into his own every aspect of character they showed.

Of course they did not expect this of him. They did not expect him to adopt their customs simply because he lived and studied with them; on the contrary, they expected quite the opposite. They expected that he would keep himself as he himself was accustomed to live; they would adapt to his habits and weave them into the fabric of life in Angavadel as they always did. They did not expect him to throw off his own habits when he saw how different theirs were, and they would have thought nothing of it if he had not, but the fact that he did, the fact that he immediately began rising before the dawn and seeking them out in their separate duties and even asking if there were duties that _he _could claim – well, _that _was something to think about. It is a curious thing – but no matter how open-minded and accepting of others' customs one becomes, there almost always a granule of thought in the vein of, 'Your way is very good, but mine is better.' Or, if one is artistically minded, 'Your way is very good, but I like mine better.' In some ways I suppose you could measure the purity of a person's capacity for understanding by the degree to which that granule of thought has been pared down. Most of us start out thinking, "Your way is wrong and my way is the best," and spend all our lives refining the statement as we meet more and more differences in custom that cannot logically be condemned, narrowing our claims of superiority into more and more defensible phrases; from 'my way is best' to 'my way is better' to 'I like my way more' and on and on and on. Now, edaphomancy has pretty much gotten this sentence as tight as it will go; something like, 'Your way is perfect in and of itself, but our way is probably more effective in this situation;' but for all that there was still a nugget of satisfaction in them to see that Jon wanted to do things their way. In many ways, edaphomancy is about coming to people where they already are – and there are few better ways to impress a group of people with that sort of dedication than to go to _them _instead.

And so when Jon's brute-armed goblin guide led him down to the first dinner gathering in Angavadel, four days after his arrival – when they had all had a chance to settle in; or, in other words, when the edaphomancers had had a few full days of work and could ease an evening without feeling too much of the obsessive worker's itch – he found the manor's residents just a _titch _more enthusiastic to see him, their smiles just a _smidgen _brighter; their curiousity barrage just a _hair _more earnest. What can we say? They are the soil's sorcerers, not her Goddess.

Well – but then there is the Son.

There was no repressing the mer; he saw Jon poke his head curiously in through the gap of the rose-bosomed dining chamber doors, the stout, white-sheathed fingers of his guide clapped firmly around the jamb, and quite abruptly abandoned the little knot towering elves with whom he had been chatting, and literally bounded across the room's resin-rubbed floor to greet the short, smiling, black-bristled little man with the warmth of his enormous palm.

"Jon," he said simply, split eyes shining softly down into the human's silk-slung face. "Good evening, Jon."

"Good evening, Tsiri," Jon responded, and his voice resonated more deeply than usual in the barrel of his chest. He grinned up at the elf, patting the back of the big hand wrapped around his. "How goes the social mingle?" He spoke in Tamrielic, as the Son had greeted him.

"Oh, swimmingly, swimmingly," Tsirelsyn answered. "But it always does. We're a fairly easy going crew, around here." And by that he meant that there had only ever been one really serious argument in his family and its associates in all of his long years as an edaphomancer.

"But come, come," he went on, switching smoothly into Altmeri. "Let us begin! It is time you met the inhabitants of this house. Come. You need none, but I will make your introductions all the same." And with his hand spanning the human's back from shoulder to shortrib and a grateful nod down to the disconcertingly girly-eyed goblin waiting with heart hammering for his acknowledgement, Tsirelsyn led Jon out to socialize, of all things, with real Alinorian elves.

It was not what he would have expected from an elf's dining room – particularly not in an enormous, exquisitely constructed manor like Angavadel. It was not the long, bright, chilly hall he would have imagined, not at all the distant, formal atmosphere he would have envisioned. It was small, warm as summer's rub, and lit only dimly with the same soft light like backlit flesh that permeated the whole house – but unique, there, in emanating not from the walls but from the twine-tangled curlicue-clusters of amber-skinned chandeliers strung up under the high-scooped ceiling and dripping diffuse glow down onto the sleek rosewood floor. The walls were set with long, rust-plush benches beneath window strips puffed plump with the plum-purple dusk. It was – cozy, of all things, with the elves milling slowly across the slick, resin-polished floor, their golden toes sinking into the thickness of its carpets, their soft voices tinkling pure tones over the trunk-sectioned table, the ruddy gleam of a real fire flickering across the flower mounded mantel at the far end of the room. Even as he slipped as a stranger between their slim clustered circles, Jon could feel the ease and the comfort they took in each other's company and in the simplicity of the surroundings. It surprised him, though he knew, having spent days and days in the company of edaphomancers and that love-lustered house, that he should not. But sometimes, eternal surprise is more of a blessing than expectant acceptance.

"Let's start here," Tsirelsyn whispered loudly down to Jon as he led the human past the curious-eyed circlets of tawny-robed elves. "Not the master of the house – no master, but a mistress, and you've already met her – but a mer of importance nonetheless. An edaphomancer, and my daughter's chief caretaker and research director. And a lovely fellow. Ah! Telendil, you old sod! Look who I've got here!" He raised his voice jovially, pressing Jon gently forward with the hands at the back of his violet vibrant robes.

The elf that turned in response to Tsirelsyn's words was the closest thing to short and stocky Jon had yet seen in Alinor. His bright blue eyes twinkled out from the – dare I say it? – _plumpness _of his smile-smeared face, and his chest was so solid and his biceps so brawny that his arms hung inches out from his torso, thick and strong. He stood with his bare feet wide and steady, like a man braced confidently against a storm or a boulder in a flood, as though he never had been budged and he never would be, in all the lives of the world.

"What's that?" he said brightly as Tsirelsyn drew up, his stubby – for an elf – ears wiggling with interest and his eyebrows waggling in kind. His sharp gaze fell swiftly to Jon. "Ah, you're he, are you?" he went on, golden cheeks dimpling deeper. "Excellent to meet you! I've heard good things of you!" He folded Jon's hand in a crushing, callus-rough grip.

"All undeserved, I'm sure," Jon replied good-humoredly, already liking the big elf.

"Well, we'll have that to see, won't we?" laughed the mer, releasing Jon's hand and clapping his shoulder. "I assume you've been given some demi-divine set of tasks to perform to win the master's favour? That is this elf's usual approach, you know; grind 'em down and growl them to gill-heads, he always says. A right bear, let me tell you." He whispered the last to Jon behind his hand.

"Malignity!" Tsirelsyn protested. "Slander! Don't believe him, Jon, don't believe him! He's a liar, through and through! It's positively pathological with him."

"I beg your pardon!" the big mer barked beefily back, his chest jumping with each word. "A _liar _I am not, you overgrown womer-waffle! I am an _enricher of the truth._" He flickered a wink down at Jon.

"Enricher!" Tsirelsyn exclaimed. "What needs truth your enrichment?"

"Truth's a feeble flower," the elf answered, his heavy chin drawing back against his short neck. It wilts, if left alone. You've got to – you know – fertilize it now and then."

Jon's shoulders shook with shy, silent laughter as Tsirelsyn snorted and shook his braids, grinning broadly. He laid a hand fondly on the short, stout mer's shoulder as he turned to Jon.

"This 'enricher' of the flower of truth is otherwise known as Telendil, Jon," he said through a smile. "He oversees most of the details of the testing done here in the valley."

"Which means that I'm the ox of Angavadel," Telendil filled in promptly, leaning conspiratorially in. "Anyone what's got a project and a plan – why, they come to me with the harness in hand." For all his grumpy, long-suffering tone, his chest was puffed up with pride.

Jon's mouth quirked. "I see. Well, ox dung can be an effective fertilizer. Very enriching."

"Exactly!" Telendil exclaimed, slit eyes sparkling as he raised a broad, callused palm in relief, as though to say, 'At last! _Here _is someone who understands me!'

"Telendil also makes sure my daughter is cared for while she is here," Tsirelsyn went on.

The stout elf leaned even further in. "Doesn't need me in the slightest, of course, as anything but an ox. Womer can take of her own self, I say, but you know how fathers' minds must be put to rest…"

"Oh, yes I do," Jon agreed, nodding sagely. "Very troublesome to keep easy minded when it comes to their daughters. Sometimes the only thing to do is to just buy a set a set of blinders and fasten them round their heads so they can focus on their own work for a change."

Telendil threw back his head, grey-streaked hair feather-floating, and chortled loudly.

"Oh, I like you," he said forcefully as Tsirelsyn shook his head in silence and good-natured tolerance. "Yes, I like him fine, Tsiri, very fine."

"Good," the looming father replied. "So do I." And Jon, blushing, thought that if all the rest of Angavadel's edaphomancers were like Telendil, it would be a most entertaining, and pleasant, visit indeed.

"You must meet my wife," the stout elf went on, beaming broadly down at Jon. "Where did she go, now?"

"I would be delighted to meet your mate," Jon said politely – and with a tint of teasing, but Telendil wasn't listening; rather, he cast about himself in the sparse-spattered crowd, searching for his chosen womer, swinging his whole torso around from the waist to scan the room. His tawny robes swished back and forth with the motion, and his hanging hands swung slightly.

"Daedra be damned, where'd the womer go?" he muttered. "Not like she could get very far, you know, but somehow she always manages to disappear. Very like a tortoise. Now where…" He trailed off into incoherent murmurs, leaving Jon and Tsirelsyn to smirk betwixt themselves and sidle closer for a whisper.

"Sorry about that," Jon said quietly, smiling charmingly up.

Tsirelsyn gave a quiet, scoffing laugh. "Sorry? You did exactly as you should. Telendil –" But then the mer himself interrupted with a blaring blast of voice.

"Aha! And there's the very wench! Stay here boys, I'll have the catch back in a single moment." And without another word, he skipped off across the resin-rubbed floor, surprisingly lightly for an elf of his size. He was back in just moments, his thick golden hand on the oddly stout waist of a turquoise-robed womer nearly a head taller than he, with tiny bones, a long, narrow face, and a sleek mane of flaxy hair. The two drew up before Jon, the womer's narrow green eyes quirked in interest, and Telendil's chest proudly swollen. She was near as stout as her husband – odd, with her thin shoulders and bird-delicate bones.

"Jon, meet my wife, Paralon," the stout elf announced. "Paralon, meet Jon, Tsiri's newest recruit to the craft."

"Welcome, Jon Urfe," Paralon said, her high, pure voice just a touch more reserved than her husband's. "Congratulations on your election. You're the first human I've ever seen here." And as Jon took the womer's bony hand, startled by her frank statement, he realized that her stoutness was not, as he had thought, the stoutness of good food and easy living, but rather the stoutness of life in its strive toward existence: she was pregnant. It was no surprise that he had not at first realized her condition; it was a shy child she carried, clinging closely in on its mother's body, not thrusting itself out before her, pumpkin-bulbous, as some he had seen. Further, there was a strangeness in the way she carried herself that put off his expectations; a stiff uprightness that strained all the muscles in her back and her shoulders into rigid ridges with the effort of supporting her swollen stomach. She did not have the slight counterbalancing backward lean Jon had seen in pregnant women, as though she refused to acknowledge the need for accomadation and clung stubbornly to her normal stance.

"Is that so?" Jon said, distracted by the realization and a bit embarrassed of the goggle his eyes popped with its strike. He released her cool fingers a bit belatedly, keeping his gaze up on her eyes and not on her gravid stomach. "Well, I'm not surprised, to be honest. Very few men have visited anywhere in Alinor, even when the Isles were part of the Empire. I daresay that if there had been many men in these parts Tsiri here would have found one to his liking long before I arrived."

Telendil and Tsirelsyn chuckled, the Son running a hand across his widow-peaked brow. Paralon's eyes twinkled kindly, but she shook her head.

"I would not be so certain, Urfe," she went on. "Tsiri is quite selective, at least from what I have observed through the years. There must be something special about you to make him so eager for your presence as to press for his daughter's permission to have you in her realm, where no man has ever come. What do you think it is?"

"I – well, I don't –" Jon stumbled, tongue twisting awkwardly. It is always a disconcerting and depressing thing, to learn that one has been accepted in a place only reluctantly and at the request of another instead of for the merits of one's own skills, and orders of magnitude more so when the reluctant allower is a pretty girl. On the other hand, there was the rush warmth at Tsirelsyn's willingness to make the request. Needless to say, Jon did not quite know how to respond to such a surprisingly blunt and tactless remark, and he floundered for a moment – but then Tsirelsyn stepped smoothly in.

"Jon is special, yes," he explained, touching the human's arm softly. "We have not spoken of it explicitly, but I do not think he will mind my explanation, regardless. You see, Paralon, Jon is one of the very, very few _sorcerers _to discover edaphomancy on their own, without the guidance of our knowledge. Certainly there are plenty of the religiously-minded who practice to a degree, but I have found that their faith often serves as a barrier to the practical, mechanistic mindset we usually take toward the craft. There hasn't been a barrage of recruits to be found anywhere in Tamriel since the folly of my Brethren in the First Era. Jon has uncovered a good bit of edaphomancy on his own – that's not something to ignore."

The womer's plucked eyebrows rose. "I see," she said. "Well, I say again, congratulations on your election, Urfe."

"Thanks," Jon replied, cheeks aflame, rubbing the back of his neck. "I'm very honored to be here." They fell silent for a long moment, each smiling a different sort of smile for their different sorts of situations; Jon's one-sided and embarrassed; Tsirelsyn's bolstering and bright; Telendil's pressing out plump mischief; Paralon's oozing surprised, apologetic politeness. They traded these smiles this way and that until Jon decided he would break the awkward air if no one else would.

"So Paralon," he began stoutly, "what is it you do? Are you in the edaphomantric legion with your husband?"

Telendil snorted. "Legion, phaw! It's as I told you, a lone ox operation around here, since Cehs is usually – wrapped up in her particular branch of the craft. And we're the only two here, usually."

"By which he means, no, no way in all the worlds," Paralon answered with an indulgent smile down on her stout elf and a subtle lean into his side. "You could tell, I'm sure, but I'm not really well suited to soil-sorcery. No, I do the entomological enchanting for the valley, not the soil work." Telendil squeezed her side gently, grinning.

"Ah. I see," Jon replied. "So… what exactly does an entomological enchantress _do?_"

"Oh, you know, program the seeding sweeps, fertilization and pollination runs, rearing and population prodding, that sort of thing. Standard practices, but adapted to the small-scale, targeted applications we need for research."

"I… see," Jon repeated, though of course he did not see at all. He slid a look sideways at Tsirelsyn, and then at Telendil; the both of them just shook their heads, faces split with grins. Jon had half a mind to pursue the topic, but the other half told him that Paralon was feeling a bit overwhelmed and embarrassed talking to him, no matter how well she hid it. He nodded minutely to Tsirelsyn, who snatched up the hint without pause.

"Well, my dear," he said, laying a paw across Paralon's thin shoulders, "I know Jon has more questions about your work, but I think we really should share him around, don't you? Everyone else is yet to meet him, you know."

"Yes, of course," she answered, nodding that narrow head and flashing a polite smile down at Jon. "Yes, you must meet the rest of the household, mustn't you?"

"I suppose so," Jon replied quietly, letting a girl-shy smile crease his cheeks. "It was a pleasure to begin with you and your husband, though."

"All of the honor is to us," Telendil stated stoutly. He squeezed his bulge-bellied womer with his beefy brawn and gave an exaggerated wink of his plump-squinted eye.

"And I am delighted to be here," Jon said as Tsirelsyn's hand began steering him off through the thin crowd once more. "Farewell! And, oh: congratulations on your conception!" The words slipped out from him on the soil-sorcery sourced tide of earnest sincerity that welled up ever stronger in his heart, with that often naïve and unwise character of irrepressible discharge that comes when one has been thinking of a thing without mentioning it for the whole of a conversation. He did not know the normal Altmeri constructs for friendly, polite acknowledgement of a womer's pregnancy, but he meant well with what he said, and assumed that that would be enough to cover whatever social stumble he might have made. Never would he have suspected the truth: that as he turned to follow Tsirelsyn's retreating back to his next set of Angavadel's elves, Paralon and her husband stood frozen on the floor behind him, his last words blazoned across the womer's pale cheeks in streaks of scarlet and flashing from her glaring green eyes. Never would he have suspected that her bony hands flew to her swollen stomach, clutching, spreading fingers in futile obfuscation of impregnation, as though to cover the ugliness of a noxious pustule or cyst. Never could he have imagined such a response to his friendly spontaneity. Advanced in edaphomancy he may have been – for a human with no training – but he had not followed through on all of its logical consequences and the effect those might have on a society shaped for millennia by the craft. And Tsirelsyn, who could have saved him much future embarrassment with a simple explanation, had not heard the man's words. Stochastic are the constituents of tragedy.

And so Jon went on oblivious to the consternation he had caused in the pregnant elf. He followed his guide's snow-shimmering net of braids through the dining chamber's smooth, dim warmth and conversational pulse, through the humming lulls and bell-swells of Altmeri voices, from cluster to knot to flock of tawny-robed elves, wielding his personality with ever greater authority. He met Angavadel's seamstresses and chefs, its repairmer and maids (and a large number of the goblins who really did the day to day work for those jobs; Tsirelsyn kept grabbing them as they laid the table, introducing Jon eagerly to all of them – he knew all their names), but mostly it was Kemendelial elves that were in attendance; expert specialists, the most skilled of the skilled, dedicated out of the aeons as research facilitators in Angavadel; agromancers, population dynamicists, climatological engineers, mycomancers, retardant chronoturges, carnal gardeners, epidemiologists, phytopathologists, and all the rest of Alinor's normal agricultural professions. In addition to those, though, there was a robust class of specialists _not _usually found in the agricultural sector but long employed in Angavadel nevertheless, for the sake of the ideological cross-fertilization which is so important to successful innovative research; arithmancers, cartographers, ichthyologists, aetherial ecologists, cosmologists, ideomancers, historians, reconstitutional vivisectionists, etc., etc.

They received the human with varying degrees of enthusiasm and polity, according to their degree of agricultural association; i.e., how long they had been hobnobbing with edaphomancers. For the most part they were politely curious, out of respect for the Son's judgement if not their own interest, and Jon felt himself more well received than he had expected. They were not edaphomancers themselves, true, but long years in the midst of soil-sorcery had smoothed away much of the characteristic Alinorian arrogance and standoffishness; it is a quintessentially crusty curmudgeon who can remain so when surrounded by the mechanists of ambericity. There remained something of racial disapproval in their eyes and in the stiffness of their spines, a slight sense of subconscious grit in his presence, but no more so than he would have expected in any society; he was an outsider, and no avoiding it. He enjoyed himself regardless; greeting and querying and chuckling his way around the room with Tsirelsyn at his side, little more than a smiling accomplice once Jon's sociality really got going, there to introduce and stand back as the short, broad-shouldered human charmed his way into conversation with pure earnestness and curiousity. Never long enough to truly _satisfy _that curiousity, of course; just enough to whet his intellectual appetite on the intricacies of Angavadel's doings. _Later_, he told himself, _later I will see how they _really_ work._

And at last, he had seen and talked with every last elf and goblin in that cozy, dawn-rosy room – all save three, that is; the three womer who had precipitated out of the social solution early on and seated themselves on the inset, rust-plush cushions beneath the dusk-flushed windows: Ilandra, Rumarene, and Cehseekye. Ilandra leaned back into Rumarene's chest, facing Cehseekye across the cushion. Cehseekye had her knees drawn up to her chest, wrapped tight with her arms and her twisted, red-gold sheet of hair. Her bare golden toes gripped the edge of the cushion as she spoke, smiling softly, with the others.

"Most likely she recommended you," the lush-limbed womer was saying to the Youngest as Jon and Tsirelsyn approached.

"You think so?" Ilandra replied dubiously, brow creasing with a frown. Her slim fingers worried the frayed end of her braid.

"They see so many barriers between them, I thought," Rumarene put in. "Wouldn't that preclude recommendation?"

"Oh, the heart finds ways around that sort of social construct very easily," Cehseekye answered, flipping her fingers. "She'd have done it obliquely, of course; some way that could have been attributed to happenstance, so that the mistress would not have to acknowledge the source even to herself. It's very typical behavior in a socially stratified system." Ilandra and Rumarene nodded in understanding.

"What's that about social stratification?" Tsirelsyn said brightly as he and Jon pulled up before the womer. "What, are my Youngest into the intricacies of urban differentiation and manufactorial specialization already?"

"No, no, father," Cehseekye said, her smile slipping away but her half-lidded eyes still lit with good humor and contentment. She met Jon's nervous eye with a brief, easy blink. "We were just discussing the reputation Ilandra has begun to build for herself without intent. A client contacted her today, and she wondered how she could have been known."

"Ah, ah ah," Tsirelsyn sighed, nodding. "I see. Who is the client, then?"

"A princess in the Capitol," Ilandra answered. "She's been touched by the epidemic."

Tsirelsyn's eyes drooped slightly at their corners. "How far along is she?" he asked quietly. Jon frowned; he had seen nothing resembling an epidemic anywhere in Alinor. Altmer are very robust, anyway, when it comes to disease.

"Not far. Just in her second octet, I think. There is time, still. We did not arrange a date yet, but probably I will go to her in – oh, a few weeks, she said."

Tsirelsyn nodded grave understanding. "And so she is merely looking for a standard –"

"Perhaps we should eat, now," Cehseekye's rich voice broke in, that voice so smooth and pure, so raw and rough underneath its alto silk. She unfolded herself gracefully, blinking a bottomless look at Jon as her long toes met the resin-rubbed floor. "Everything is ready."

"Yes, let's," Ilandra agreed, sitting up and smiling warm greeting at Jon as she stretched her slim arms above her head. "I am sure that Jon is hungry! He has been very busy these last few days."

Jon blushed, looking down at his boots on the maroon-grained floor. "I am a bit hungry," he admitted obligingly, although really all thoughts of food had fallen directly into slumber-snuffling dormancy the moment he entered the cozy little room. He had not missed the purposefulness of Cehseekye's interruption, but he was feeling too warm and pleasant to press the point.

"Then let us to the dinner," Cehseekye said with that rich-raw voice. Her steady eyes blinked once at Jon, and then slid a gentle smile up at her father. She took his forearm in her hands, her hair shimmering with sun-streaks compressed like gemstones, and pulled the white-braided mer off across the floor toward the table.

"No announcement?" Jon murmured as he waited for Rumarene and Ilandra to rise and follow. The father-daughter pair passed silent and slick through the crowd.

Ilandra shook her head as she and her partner fell in to either side of him in the coruscant-feathered wake of the Mother and Son. "Why an announcement, Jon?"

Jon shrugged, thinking the question odd, its answer self-evident. "To let people know that they should assemble, I guess."

"It is nothing so formal," Rumarene explained from the human's other side. "Anyone could have begun eating at any time, and no one is obliged to seat themselves now merely because we have. They probably will, of course, merely because most waited only for the full meal to be arrayed, but there is no expectation that they must."

Ilandra's sweet voice chimed in, perfectly in cadence with her partner's as always, and as always slightly shocking for it by the disparity of their twain tones; dulcet and determined, feathery and firm. "We have many different people here, Jon, with many different preferences. Some prefer to take their meals early, some late; some prefer to eat standing or sprawled by the fire-frill. We embrace all of these, as… non-typical as that has become, in Alinor. But we do as we like, in Angavadel."

Jon nodded silently. It was not what he had expected from Altmer, even Kemendelian Altmer, but he was glad for the surprise; glad to find naturalness among the artifice-obsessed elves; glad to think that all the elves he had met in that splinter-spun room with its curlicue-clustered chandeliers, its skin-curved corners and sweeping, ruddy-basted mantel were all there because they wanted to be, all milling and circling in their conversation-cores with their gilt mouths murmuring and their byssus busts whispering to each other of their flesh-framed hearts' truest thoughts because those thoughts were of love for one another, and not for some artificial social obligation. It gladdened him to see that though most of Alinor was coldness and formality and social-structured associations, here, at least, was a pocket where the people truly cherished one another.

"Here, Jon," Ilandra said softly as they reached the table, touching his elbow. "Here is your seat, and ours."

"Ah, thank you, madame," he answered, flashing a charming, crease-cheeked smiled up at the womer. "I was a bit lost in my thoughts, there." And he sat, and took a good look at the chamber's table for the first time.

It was an odd table, but perfectly suited to the room. Massive, it was, broad enough to seat all of Angavadel's elves at once, but not distant; huge, but not separating. For it was not continuous, not of one piece; its surface was formed from many invaginated planes of cross-sectioned cypress trunk, fitted gap to protrusion with clever puzzle-positioning and subtle sealing into a spiraling circuit of individual gleam-glowing lignin slabs variously sized for three to seven seats each. Sections of the splotched spiral lifted up on hinges to allow easy access. The seats were spine slumps of silky cedar; their sweet-sharp aroma swam up to Jon's nostrils. It was all very intimate, very personal in design, meant to keep its users close to each other, not separated by an insurmountable span of glossy grain. An ancient thing; its edges had been smoothed and polished more by skin than sand.

It was one of the innermost buttress-slices to which Ilandra and Rumarene had led him, and both Cehseekye and Tsirelsyn were there as well, the latter crinkling twinkles across at Jon and the former peering divinatory down into the wood-whorled gleam with her peach-cheek on her palm. The Youngest settled in to either side of the human.

"Ready, Jon?" Tsirelsyn said cheerfully, bright-split eyes blinking. His fingers poised on the handle of the brass-blustered platter before him. "Everything's all there!" He nodded to the identical, covered platter before Jon; the things ringed the table-segment before each seat.

"Oh?" Jon said, pulling himself up slightly in his seat; they'd made on taller, for him specifically, it seemed, which let him sit without his chin on the tabletop but also left his toes swinging several inches above the floor. He poked uncertainly at the beaming dome before him, and at the polished, root-wrought silverware alongside it. "We don't need to wait?" It wasn't that which really restrained him, of course.

"Not at all!" Tsirelsyn answered cheerfully as he lifted away the lid of his platter, freeing his steam-mushroom as Ilandra and Rumarene had as Jon spoke. "The rest will come as they like. So eat, eat eat!" And he promptly snatched up his own knife and fork to do just that.

Jon slid his eye around the table, across the green-piled plates of the womer at his sides, across the iron-solid goblets, disconcertingly dented amidst the exquisite beauty of the chamber and its occupants, over the trio of lidded porcelain pitchers waiting in the center, sidling between the smaller covered baskets and basins scattered across the table. Because Jon, for all the ease he had had in Angavadel thus far, all the embracing acceptance he had developed, all the urbane precognitions he had obliterated, was still uncomfortable at the bare prospect of bread broken with elves. It was not a reticence that stemmed from his own customs – he had eaten with elves many, many times on the mainland – so much as from his consciousness that they were breaking an untouchable Alinorian norm by sitting there with him and eating the same food as he. Sympathetic embarrassment; one of the clearest signs of entanglement.

He glanced up, briefly, and was snare-snatched and clutched by the black-gold heterochromia of the womer across from him. She had not cracked her platter, either; she watched him across it, cheeks flush-lush and heavy eyelids fruit-flesh fresh. Then she looked away, and her delicate hand rose to grasp the handle of one of the sea-porcelain pitchers, and a breast-gush of froth flowed into her goblet; glugging amrita, purest white against the black iron. And Jon looked down, hearing the clink of the pitcher set back down on the table, and then lifted away the lid of his dinner.

Steam kissed his face with droplet-dimpling blossom burst; a rush of familiar flavors crushed against his nose like old clothes or dried flowers, and quite suddenly he was no longer in Alinor at all, no longer anywhere in Tamriel that he had visited for the past fifteen years. He was back home, at last, back in the cramped little clay-bricked kitchen of his childhood with the richness of fresh-boiled rice twining jasmine round his nose from the close-held wooden bowl against his belly, shot through with the sweetness of coconut milk and the sharpness of split peppers and seared chilies, the comfort shroud of his father's pipe puffing reliable tabac-cloy above his head and the steam of mother's water boiling on the ochre-walled fire before him, water in a dented iron pot, ruddy-rubbed from the flames; water with tea leaves in it, _like drinking silver_, father always said as he drank it anyway, slurping lustily, dusky powder-rolled power shadow-slinking through the olfactory panoply, and underneath it all, within it all, the rusted earth smell of the clay walls, of the soil that housed him, fed him, and fostered him.

He opened his eye. He did not realize he had closed it. On his plate was a ball of white rice, a brass bowl of black-blistered pepper flesh, a slimy slab of fried sucker slice, and a little platter of coconut milk; shambling look-a-like to the sacred elven amrita. And Jon, with the sight he had already begun to develop, with the tingling prickle of his Mangler against his chest, saw through those simple items to their source: Cyrodiil's Nibenay Valley, and the ochre ultisols therein.

The elves said nothing. Tsirelsyn's flicker of a look noted that Jon had realized his meal's origins, but seemed to think it no matter; it was an important thing, to the Altmer, this particularity over the origin of one's food, and no doubt he thought Jon would be honored to be included in the custom, if he knew of it. Jon, of course, was not; here was what he had thought would be his first Alinor-born and Altmer-shared meal, and he found it instead to be but what he had been raised on. But he pulled himself up regardless, bolstered his faltering faith with an accepting smile, and took up his fork to sup of his childhood.

The whole of their little table clinked and clattered with the tinkling song of supper, so common and comforting; with the squeak-scrape-skitter of Ilandra's knife across her plate as she sliced a long green vegetable with palely seeded innards; with the business like snick snick snick of Rumarene's fork partitioning her baby bean-mysteries, steamed root-whatnots, and seared yellow-somethings into equally apportioned piles; with the goblet gurgling, iron-brash banging of Tsirelsyn's cup on the table (dear Mother Mara, that mer with a thick skin of amrita on his upper lip); with the quiet tap-tap-tip-fuwump of Cehseekye's domed platter set softly aside for her sweet-smooth face to bend over the steam-belching dish. Jon smiled, and spooned coconut milk over his ball of sticky white rice. So he was not eating the same food as they; it was of no matter. He was there, with them, in Tsirelsyn's (or perhaps Cehseekye's) personal manor, and he was eating. _That is enough, _he told himself, and dug happily into his meal.

But of course, it was not enough. Jon had simply become more skilled in selective sight.

"Well you're as silent as a bunch of berries dangling on the vine!" a thick, cheery voice boomed out suddenly when the group had been busily engaged for a minute or so. "More silent! Berries at least whisper the dirty secrets of their entomophillic conceptions down to the virginal ears of the caterpillars and cutworms! This cluster, though; why, you don't even have a hint of a sordid undertone! Nothing at all going on, even under the table!"

Jon looked up from his rice, smiling lopsidedly, knowing who it must be. And, indeed; there was buff-broad Telendil standing over them, eyes like berries themselves, squeezed in the plump golden press of his face, tummy-bulbous Paralon leaning against his side in her fluttery turquoise robes, narrow face smiling around at the other edaphomancers.

"No, nothing subplanar here, Telendil," Jon spoke up thickly, swallowing a mouthful of octopus arm. "You'll have to join us, and liven up the subtext!" He winked, and smiled up at Paralon – who, to his surprise, flinched and looked away, her mouth tight and white-golden.

Telendil's smile checked too as he saw his wife's reaction, but he laughed regardless and clapped Jon on the shoulder with a beefy hand.

"I daresay I shall, Youngest!" he said, sidling past Ilandra to the two empty spine-slumping seats beside Cehseekye. "Inject some interest! Perhaps liven up some limps, mm? Hahaha!" He chortled loudly as he lowered himself, grandma-cautious with his rump, into the chair. Paralon the pregnant, seated herself with comparative grace.

"I really don't think we need that sort of 'interest,' Tel," Tsirelsyn said across the table, waggling his moon-glinting spoon with a good-hearted grin. "You'll just make trouble."

"I beg your venerability's age-oiled pardon!" Telendil rejoindered in mock outrage. "A bit of amour does not but liven up the blood and firm up the bones! Think of these young folk, Tsiri! They've got fires in their bellies, mer! Have some sympathy! Embrace all aspects of love, not just the narrow, dogmatic view of the establishment!"

Tsirelsyn threw down his spoon and back his head, letting out three great guffaws. "Right, right, we must embrace _all _aspects of love," he said, chuckling. "_All _aspects. Il and Ruma already do, though, don't they?"

The pair framed Jon with identical peach blushes, tossing fond looks over his head. Jon's ears reddened hotly with sympathy and awkwardly inserted proximity.

"But what of our Youngest, here?" Telendil pursued interestedly, peering across at Jon through the mushroom mist of his plate, the dome poised in his fingers. "Do you have a lady waiting for you some whereabouts, Jon?"

Jon's ears burned even hotter; he was not so keen on Telendil's teasing when it turned to him. "Something like that," he mumbled down to his plate. He could feel two pairs of heavy-lidded eyes intent upon him; crinkle-twinkling black-gold and ripeness-wrapped gold and black. Sweat prickled between his shoulder blades.

"Really, Jon?" Ilandra exclaimed. "Oh, do tell us about her, do!"

The human's fork clink-clicked across his plate after three stray grains of rice. "Well…" Jon flashed a look around the table; all eyes on him, of course, just as his skin had told him. A gallery of golden elves looking down on him; that long-gone dinner of the Thalmor's flashed through his mind, resurgent relic of another life. Another life entirely, and how could he talk about – her – as if she were still part of the new? "Well… she's a mage, of sorts," he said shyly. "In the College. And she's very sweet and – good to me." He stopped, and picked at his food, feeling the expectant appraisal of the edaphomantric ring.

"How long have you been with her?" Rumarene asked definitely, seeking the facts.

"Oh… a few months," Jon answered, embarrassed. "Not… very long." Gods, but how shallow he must seem to them, to the Altmer with their sweet-heart eternity-intendeds, their millennial marriages. Not very long, indeed; the entirety of his relationship with Odfrin would be nothing but passing infatuation, to them.

"No, not very long," Ilandra said delicately. "But all relationships start out young. You love her, Jon?"

"Yes," Jon answered quickly; the heat spread to his smooth-shaven cheeks. "Yes. I love her very much." As though that counted for anything, with them; his love was a weak and flighty thing, compared to theirs. He shoveled a bite of pepper and milky rice into his mouth, staring down at his plate as he chewed. The elves kept silent for a long moment, either restraining their opinions on his 'love' or aware of his embarrassment and politely dropping the topic.

Then a voice, raw and rich.

"What is her name?" Cehseekye.

Jon looked up into those lazy eyes, bow-bending heavy as ripe fruit, into that frank, open face with its full lips still and slightly parted. He searched Cehseeyke's eyes with his, then looked down at his brass plate once more.

"Odfrin," he said. "Her name is Odfrin."

And the mer definitely did sense his mood at that, though whether they plumbed all the complexities of its depths or accepted it at surface value as absent-longing I do not know. Regardless, they kept a respectful silence for several minutes, not even Telendil brash enough to unleash his stock of jests from his barrel chest but rather eating in grave composure, squeezing his wife's fingers with a fond look now and then. The clinking song of supper ruled once more, along with the heightening bell-choir hum of mer-voice as the rest of Angavadel's elves meandered in to their assigned seats in the cypress-slabbed spiral. Dinner rolled into its full functioning.

It was Ilandra's quite chime, a single note in the chorus, that broke the silence at their table.

"You know, you're right," she said mysteriously, stilled suddenly and staring at Telendil. The frizzles of her braid blazed red-gold in the light, sister to the garbled glass chandeliers above.

"Yes, my dear, I am aware of that," the stout elf answered seriously without pause, sipping soup from a fat spoon. "How is this remarkable in any way?"

The table rang with laughter; even Cehseekye's lips curled. Ilandra dimpled her cheeks at Telendil and waved a delicate hand. "Oh, you," she said. "I was just thinking – you know, you're right. He _is _the Youngest now."

"Of course he is," Telendil said without looking, focused on the pale broth spilling from his spoon onto his tongue. "He is in training, and he is younger than both of you, so he is the Youngest. Simple logical deductions, darling." His lips puckered around the edge of the spoon.

"It's just… odd," Il went on, turning to stare down at Jon, who blinked uncertainly. "Isn't it odd, Ruma, to think that we're not the Youngest anymore?"

"It is odd," Rumarene said as she sipped at her amrita. "But the sensation passes quickly." Ilandra's eyes pressed tight in fond amusement.

"Hm… wait, wait," Jon spoke up. "Youngest? But… I mean, I am only here as an ambassador. I'm not really an apprentice."

"Of course you are," Tsirelsyn boomed out firmly. "We do not do things by halves, Jon. You are studying with us; therefore you are one of us."

_One of you, aye, _Jon thought. _But if that is so, why was this rice grown in the bends of the Niben? _"I can't express how much I appreciate that," was his response, however, and sincerely meant; Tsirelsyn had given him so much more than any other elf in Alinor, even if he had not come, as Jon thought, all the way. "But, truly, Tsiri, I cannot stay here forever. I have students, research, responsibilities with the College. I have to return to Cyrodiil eventually. This – this isn't my land." And as he said that, a shiver shuddered through his bones like the clanging of a bronze bell struck with a hammer of temporal multiplicity. _This – this is not my land, after all. _He frowned suddenly, disconcerted with the sensation.

"That is your choice, Jon." Tsirelsyn's voice slipped softly to him, thronged with imagined whispering echoes; _to be expected as we designed as you chose as we wove as we wove as we wove wove wove w- o o – o –v –v v –ve – _"If you feel a strong affinity for the soils of your homeland, then you must follow that feeling. And I can see that you do; the nulisols of Nibenay run incredibly deep in you, Jon. _You are sealed within your soil. _If they had not caught you so tightly I would have invited you to remain with us indefinitely – but as it is, you could never be content with such. So when the time comes, you will return to Cyrodiil, but you _will return as one of us; an edaphomancer forever._"

Jon raised his eye ever so slightly, and caught the black-gold glimmer of Tsirelsyn's soft watch. "Thank you," he said thickly, quietly, not understanding the muscular congestion in his throat. "That – is very comforting to hear." And it was, for the embrace it embodied, but also unnerving; it put the burden directly on Jon. He _could _stay if he wanted to, but he didn't want to. He didn't want to. It wasn't his land, and – and – and – it never could be – _but I wish it was. _He swam in the Son's soft eyes for an endless moment, aching without knowing why and loving it and hating it and loving it.

"Well that's all a bit too serious, now isn't it?" Telendil's voice broke in like a business-bound bull. "Why don't you just buy us all pinstriped robes and call us layers-with-law – that dry old hag – if we're to be so crusty and strictly spun?"

"Yes, yes, I second the motion for a subject-shift," Ilandra said, rolling a little wink down to Jon.

"I third the motion," Rumarene tacked on crisply, "and append an addendum: we have our new Youngest here, and we barely know anything about him. An interview is requisite."

"I'll vote for that," Tsirelsyn replied with a wry grin at pig-stuck Telendil. Jon shook his head down at his half-empty plate once more, ears blood-stiff and hot. "What do you say to this, Cehs?"

The quiet womer flicked an unreadable look up from the dinner to which she had been silently attending; first at her father, then Rumarene and Ilandra, then Jon. She spoke only one word before closing in once more on the steaming spoon in her thin fingers.

"Aye."

Tsiri nodded happily, and he and the womer bracketing Jon turned to look expectantly at Telendil. The mer met them with arched eyebrows and pursed lips. He stared at them sourly for a long moment. Then he burst out, his voice like bright bells despite his size.

"Oh fine!" he exclaimed. "Fine! Make the mer what expressly requested a cessation to formality participate in this disgustingly legislative display! Fine! I double the proposal; hell, I triple it, I quadruple it, I pile my profuse executive acclaim upon it, I salute it with tertiary clauses and principal principles, I anoint it with ratifications and resolutions, I enfold it in judicial justification and debauch it with obligatory dissenting declamations, and I demand a lucid holistic narrative from this apprentice edaphomancer!"

The elves shivered with sonorous laughter as the rubicund elf drew a deep, shuddering breath from the wake of his monologue. Jon pressed his eye tight shut, chuckling soundlessly.

"So," Telendil stated stoutly when he had regained breath and when his cheeks had faded to just a slight rose, "I believe we exist in a state of unanimity? Then let us initiate the interview." And he snatched up his iron goblet and buried his long, hooked nose in the tip-dripping comfort of amrita.

"Is an interview really necessary?" Jon said shyly. "I mean, I agree, there's no need for such formality…"

"Oh, it needn't be formal, no," Ilandra stated with a dimpled smile. "I'll show you, watch: So, Jon, you're an ambassador to Alinor? How did you get that position?"

The human hesitated a moment under her eyes, uncertain whether or not he was actually supposed to answer. He began timidly.

"Well… I have worked for the College as an envoy to many parts of Tamriel, over the years," he said. "When the College finalized our agreement with the – the School of Thoughts and Calculations-" dear Mara but they were all looking at him and he was probably completely mangling the truth of the situation, "- we sent a few sets of Ambassadors here to Alinor to sort of – test the conditions. See if it was – well, safe." A flicker of wry smiles and acknowledging nods wavered before him in the heat of his flaming cheeks. "After they returned safely, the College thought it was time to send its more – well, expert and skilled members as Ambassadors."

"So that's you, then," Rumarene said matter-of-factly as her bright teeth flashed around a morsel of braised greenery.

"Well – um – well, yes," Jon admitted. "Not to sound too arrogant, but yes."

"It's not arrogance if you're simply presenting the facts, Jon," Tsirelsyn said. "So where else in Tamriel have you visited for the College?"

Jon's brow rose, and he let out a low whistle. "That's a long list," he said, warming. "Everywhere, basically. High Rock, Skyrim, Elsweyr, Valenwood, even ruined Morrowind, over the years."

Ilandra leaned her hand on her cheek, watching intently. "And what kind of work were you doing in all those places?"

"Oh, you know," Jon answered with a little laugh as he sat forward on his chair and thrust an enthusiasm spined fork into his rubbery octopus arm-barrage. "The College has been very big on academic collaboration lately – we're trying to build a network of arcane researchers and our reputation at the same time – so mostly I was dispatched to negotiate with different academic institutions - the University of Gwylim, the College of Winterhold, the Cach'me'cach, that sort of thing. I also investigated any tales of novel spellwork in the indigenous populations – and of course I dispelled curses, banished daedra, and purified contaminated magicka nodes whenever I could. Too many mages just ignore the needs of the common people, so most in Tamriel have only negative associations with magic outside their own rituals; the College wants to change that. We'd like to see magic become something anyone can approach without fear and explain with the proper logic."

"Really?" Rumarene said, and suddenly all crispness was gone from her voice, replaced by smooth, genuine interest. "That's so strange. Why would people fear magic? No one here fears magic."

Jon shared a wry smile with Tsirelsyn and Telendil. "That's because this is Alinor, Ruma, where magic is everywhere and has been forever. Your people have a stronger affinity for it than mine, as you may know; in most parts of Tamriel, magic is a moderately rare thing. Oh, of course it's all around us. Just as it is here, but not in the same, obviously harnessed way. Many people cast cantrips here and there on instinct, without realizing it, but only a few begin to wield their magicka with conscious purpose. Of those few, only a handful would approach their craft with the clarity and practicality necessary for magicka to reach its true potential – and so, the College, here to teach the rest."

The womer's slick-helmeted head bobbed, her slit black eyes fixed on Jon. "I see. What a difference. Here, all are at least familiar with the basic principles of magic, even if they have no talent themselves. Wow." She stared off into the distance of the flesh-filtered room, pondering and poring in silence.

"So… what exactly _is _this College?" Ilandra filled into her partner's pause, questingly continuing the interview. "Tel, Cehs, and Tsiri know, of course," she said, gesturing with her fork, "but Ruma and I haven't reached Current Events in our studies, yet."

"Well, the College's rise is hardly a _current event_, by most estimations," Jon replied with a rolling laugh, "but – well, I suppose it could be for you. The College of Whispers is the premier secular institution of magical learning in all of mainland Tamriel. We are based in Cyrodiil, but as I said we have recently established a series of academic collaboration agreements with other education centers, and we receive students from all across the continent. We are dedicated to the proliferation of arcane knowledge and skills as well as to the development of new magical techniques through extensive experimental testing. We may be young, to your eyes, at just under two centuries, but we are a fixture of Imperial life."

"Ahh, I see," Ilandra replied, bright-eyed. "Much like Bphthynnis' Thaumato Vulgaris, then."

"Our roots do lie in the old Mage's Guild," Jon admitted, shrugging his broad shoulders in their black silk, "but we have eliminated some of the elements that led to the downfall of that organization. We are specifically a _College_, dedicated to learning; we have dispensed with the restrictive esoteric dogma of old." Ilandra's narrow eyebrows rose in interest at this, but it was her other-self that pressed the next question.

"Elements?" Rumarene asked. "What elements? What dogma?"

Jon flicked a look round the table before he answered, gauging the attitudes of his committee for possible offense at his words, but both Tsiri and Telendil were as fixed on him as Il and Ruma, watching with bright, wide eyes and eating only absently. Cehseekye did not seem to be paying his interview any mind – the womer's smooth-sculpted face was turned down to her brassy mirror of a plate and her body was still and solid as it seemed almost always to be – and likewise for Paralon, though the swollen-stomached womer did not ignore Jon so much as sprinkle him every so often with a spray of sour little glances. Heedless of these – oblivious of them, rather, the human continued.

"The Mages Guild always had a certain tint of… well, spirituality. I mean, it was born here, with the Psijiics, right? It was born from mysticism. And when it came to the mainland, it attracted the similarly minded; hedge wizards, hill witches, tribal warlocks, and all the other primitive magicians of the native populations poured out to join up, and they brought with them all of their ritualism, their superstitions, and their own personal flavors of mysticism and incorporated them into the fabric of the Guild."

"My apologies, Jon," Tsiri's deep gong tone vibrated out; the enormous elf fluttered his long fingers in cursory beseech. He peered gravely down at Jon and at the two womer at his sides, and there was suddenly in his eyes that strange, disconcerting look of ancient wisdom, mountain-massive knowledge, and unfathomable age; a subtle droop at their corners, a dulling of their glimmer, a slight slip in focus, as though they had trained on something far beyond the sight of any other. "I must interrupt briefly." Even his voice seemed older, slower, and ever so subtly wheezing. "The Psijiics are our sisters, Jon. We spring from the same philosophy, but from different dedications. They are as mechanistic as we, but masked by the nature of their dedication. I need say no more on that now; I only wished to clarify that the Mages Guild developed astray from Psijiic beliefs, not according to them."

"If you say so, Tsiri, I will not contradict you," Jon replied with a soft laugh and a crinkling smile. "You were there, after all. Regardless, though, the _seeming _of unscientific spiritualism in the Mages Guild's primordia attracted all manner of misguided mages from across the mainland, often pulling them from positions of religious significance in their scattered societies. That religiousness became indelibly stamped upon the fabric of the Guild; they were constantly hampered by a thousand interwoven ritualistic traditions, superstitions, and esoteric dogmas. Prohibitions and taboos abounded, and mages approached their studies more with passion and intuition than logic and experimention. Less than half of the research put out by the Guild was sufficiently thorough and supported for incorporation into their body of magical knowledge, but _all _of it was accepted, without question. They played at research, aping Alinorian traditions, but swallowed unreason-riddled hypotheses whole and wholesale. Their history has many swells and dips, of course, but its general trend is one of decay, of the loss of talent and knowledge to willful religious ignorance." He paused, working moisture back into his throat, then went on, his voice slower and deeper. "I am not discrediting religion, understand," he said, looking steadily around the table past his heavy black brow, "the gods are, of course, undeniable. I am merely saying that we should take the world as they left it to us, not as we wished them to have left it."

"Of course, of course," Telendil replied gruffly, waving a hand. "No one here will dispute that. So your College, then, has expunged the ingrained spiritualism of the Mages Guild and embraced pure mechanistic investigation?"

"Yes," Jon agreed with a nod. "Yes, essentially. The Mages Guild schismed nigh on two centuries ago, the crystallization of this split in philosophy, and the College of Whispers was born - along with the Synod, the opposite pole of ideological extremism."

"The Synod?" Ilandra prompted in Jon's pause, toying with her idle spoon.

"The Synod," he repeated sourly. "The logical consequence of our secularity: purely spiritual sorcerers. They vastly outnumbered the College's founding members - which is why we're 'of Whispers,' incidentally - and they still do outnumber us, despite our surge in growth and prestige. We have not had a - cordial relationship with the Synod. Ever. Until we gained our charter, they hunted us down as heretics."

The fray-braided womer's eyes widened, and her mouth fell into its characteristic little 'o'. "Oh, my," she said. "That is not... friendly."

"No," Jon agreed, "no, it is not friendly in the slightest." And for a few minutes the conversation lay slain on the table, gutted like their dinners, and Jon just sipped at the wine in his goblet and stared musingly down at the gleam-grained tabletop, musing over the long-learned history of his organization. The others, too, seemed lost in thought, or in the last remnants of their food; Ilandra gazed dreamily up at the curlicued-chandelier, brow furrowed cutely in thought; Rumarene's ink-slit eyes stared, glazed and unfocused, into the distance; Tsirelsyn savored the dregs of his amrita in slow, swirling gulps; Paralon bent over her plate, picking at her food, her mouth still tight and severe; Telendil leaned back in his chair, fingers laced across the stomach of his tawny robes and eyes drooping in sleepy contentment. And Cehseekye, who merely sat with her flushed cheek pillowed on her hand, long lashes downcast. The golden hued hum of clinking cutlery and Altmeri tongues thrummed around them from the rest of the trunk-sectioned spiral, comforting as the rich and simple beauty of the chamber's polished rosewood and suffusing heat.

Eventually, though, as is inevitable in these situations, someone had to rouse themselves enough to continue the conversation; it was Telendil who accepted the burden then, with a sleep-shedding shake of his head and a spine-straightening shudder in his chair.

"So, Jon," he said with a tired little exhalation, "how long have you been with the College, now? And how did you fall in with them, in the beginning?"

Jon started from his study. "Ohh, I've actually been with the College most of my life," he explained. "I was recruited as an apprentice when I was just fifteen."

"Is that young?" Ilandra asked, and Jon had to smile at the polity of the question.

"Fairly young, yes," he answered, "but not remarkably so. What is remarkable is the fact that I was accepted into the College at all. I mean, the College isn't a washout for noble second sons, but neither can it operate for nothing; it's mostly the well-to-do merchant class that fills our rosters and coffers. We aren't to the point, yet, that we can offer education at rates affordable to small-time farmers, like my parents. But - well, they made an exception for me." He looked down, smiling humbly.

"Oh ho!" Telendil exclaimed. "So our Jon was a prodigy, eh? Spelled some passing witch's panties off, did you? No training?"

Jon's eyes creased tightly closed as he coughed an astonished laugh down to his plate. "Not anything quite like that," he answered embarrassedly. "Not at all. We were just in town for market, one fall, and I was talking with this Khajiiti trader I'd befriended through the years. He dealt in petty magician's supplies - common alchemical reagents, morpholiths, that sort of thing - and had taught me ab it of what he knew. Well, that day, it happened that one of the College's Eavesdroppers - our active agents - was in old Qanaro's stall, and overheard us chatting in Ta'agra. I don't know what prompted him to it, but he spoke to me - in Bosmeri, of all things - and I answered in kind. Then he moved on to High Cyrod, and then Yokudan, both of which I knew somewhat as well; the seasonal trade community is very diverse, in Cyrodiil, and my parents always took us to market at least six or seven times a year."

"So this agent was impressed by your youthful linguistic mastery?" Telendil prompted, his blonde eyebrows arched.

"Somewhat, I think," Jon answered, "though really it wasn't all that remarkable; children almost always assimilate languages with ease. It was more that I was discussing _magic _in a foreign tongue that attracted him than the foreign tongue itself, I think. But anyway, he was not interested enough to take me back to the College with him, only to ask after my parents and our farm. My recruitment grew out of that question, but it wasn't enough on its own. There was something - else - required." He pursed his lips tightly, suppressing a grin, his eyes sparkling with humor. "That came a few years later. I was out in the fields - the paddies, really, but they were dry and dusty between crops, then - just idling as boys will do, fiddling with -" _my Mangler, _he had been going to say, "- things I found and bits of magic I had picked up in the city. I don't remember exactly what I did," oh yes he did remember; he'd wrapped a shed scrap of snake skin around his needle-crystal and stabbed it into the ochre earth, "but the result was - well, catastrophic, albeit not immediate. Snakes started flooding into our land, these great, huge, poisonous green tree snakes that, judging from sediment-section studies, used to be everywhere in Cyrodiil but are now quite rare. Within three days, every inch of our fields was crawling with them; they must have come from miles and miles around to have so many." Not true, and Jon knew it; there had not been that many verdigris in Cyrodiil at one time point for a thousand years. "They were in everything; the grain, the ponds, the stables, our beds, everything. And - well, they were copulating madly. It wasn't a pleasant time." The elves nodded, all surprisingly grave; but of course this was Alinor, where the only good snake is a dead one. Jon continued his story, fiddling idly with this fork.

"Luckily, that same Eavesdropper happened to be passing by on his errands, and happened to step down our lane - I guess to check up on the child he had met years before, though why he remembered me and my home after so long I truly have no idea - and he stumbled in on our troubles. Well, the whole village was gathered around us at that point, as the snakes had started to spread, so I suppose it's not so unusual that he foudn us. He did what he could to help, but it wasn't much, so he conjured up a projection of one of the College's experts for some remote thaumaturgy; let me tell you, _that _was fascinating to see, for a young boy easily dazzly by any magic. The expert could not reverse the spell either, but he _could _locate its source - me. Between the two of them - agent and expert - they were able to guide me through the reversal successfully. After I'd taken a good communal beating, of course." Tsirelsyn smiled softly, at that, and Telendil nodded understandingly.

"So after that, you joined the College?" Ilandra asked.

Jon nodded, and answered with a low chuckle. "Well, yes. I think they'd have taken me regardless - I mean, I had cast a spell without training that their expert could not reverse - but they weren't given much choice; the rest of the village practically packed my things and tied me to the agent's saddle."

They laughed, at that; a sonorous jangle of ranged bells from all of them - except Cehseekye and Paralon, of course, who were still as respectively stoic and sour as ever; if anything, Cehseekye's mouth had stiffened even further as Jon's story progressed, as though something in it turned her stomach. Telendil seemed unaffected by his wife's displeased reticence; he leaned forward, arms crossed on the table, and spoke with fond interest.

"Well, Jon," he said, green eyes squeezed tight against his brow by his plump-pressing cheeks, "you're a proper prodigy, indeed! Dazzling the masters before you've even been trained!"

"Oh, no, no," Jon replied, shaking his head and blushing hotly. "No, that was just a pubescent outburst. I'm really not that special."

"No, Jon, you are," Tsirelsyn gonged. The human met his heavy-lidded eyes briefly, and then fled their frank seriousness. "You think we always find students who have discovered so much of edaphomancy as you have? We do not. You have, by chance or fate or design, a very special edaphomantric receptivity. You are more connected to your land than any human I have ever seen. That is what led your College to you, and that is what led you to us." He watched Jon steadily, a shadow of that same ancient aura still in his eyes. Again, Jon could not hold the gaze for long; he looked away, and mumbled out his embarrassed thanks. The awkwardness of the moment did not last long, to his relief; Telendil spoke up once more, pressing the interview to its everpresent, if never-acknowledged, point.

"So you're from the Nibenay Basin, Jon?" he said, gaze clear and focused. "What region, exactly?"

Jon suppressed a wry smile, at that; ah yes, _here _was an experienced edaphomancer, who would ask him the question directly despite that he could see the answer with perfect ease in the horizons of Jon's profile. "In the south, along the Panther River," he answered, creasing his eye knowingly at the stout elf.

Telendil smiled back. "Ah, yes. I've not been there myself, but I've heard it was a beautiful area. Not the most fertile of soils, of course, but - well. That's nothing new. Did your parents have much luck with them? What did they farm?" And as Jon answered, a sudden tingling charge raced across his skin. Something had shifted, something had sharpened in the elven foci, something had tightened in the fabric of the scene like the warping strain of a single strand pulled against the weave of the whole. Cehseekye's eyes flicked suddenly up to meet his. And though Jon felt this, and knew that they had come to something far more important to the edaphomancers than his history with the College, he was not unnerved. He answered as though nothing had changed, comfortably absorbed in the acceptance of the present and the surprising poignance of the past.

"We did as well as any, I think," he mused, eye drifting aimlessly over the crowd of seated elves. "We were just the same as anyone, really. There was never anything different about us. My mother was an immigrant, yes, but that is common in the Empire's heart. She and my father farmed the land as his family has done for generations, like everyone else in the Heartlands, like all the descendants of the slaves and indentures of the dead old plantations, all the families who own now in name what they have always owned in body and soul. Rice, primarily, because we were so near the marshes, but alternated with wheat and millet and sweet-stem, mung beans and merrrow-weed for wholesale, and lesserly leeks, lavender, tabacco, flax, button bolete, ginseng, and a fair group of other common vegetables and specialty cash crops - for apothecaries, and the like. Sheep, goats, docile hares for the pampered ladies of the city, fair-plumaged birds too, crabs and slaughter eggs for a bit of extra money at market. But none of that is special... everyone did the same."

"Did you help your parents much with the work, when you were young?" The voice drifted to him through the dreaming haze of his memory; he did not even know who asked.

"Yes... yes, of course. You had to help. It wasn't easy work... the fields had to be tilled, broken, seeded, the sprouts tended, water trenches dug and shored... the animals needed tending, feeding, the smaller plots weeding... and when a piece of land was exhausted, after ten years or so of repeated harvest, there was the clearing and reclaiming, the carving out of a new plot from the forest's rest, the slashing, chopping, stacking and straining..."

"Is that how they farmed? By cycling the land between forest and cultivation?"

"Yes," Jon answered, and elaborated, but he no longer heard his own words. He had left Angavadel entirely, his mind floating away as though tugged softly to a distant anchor by gossamer webbing. He was back in Cyrodiil, and back on his father's farm as he had not been for decades, remembering it as he had not for so many years; remembering the sex-slickness of the humid-huffing forest running down his bare little-boy chest, sliding between his haunches, slicking his auburn curls against his skull; remembering the jar of the leather-strapped iron scythe against his blister-burnt fingers, the jolting ache in his thin shoulders, the satisfying _thwish thwack thwump _of leaves fainting with each stroke of his blade; remembering the comfortable rhythm of the other hewers' piercing Nibenese cries ringing out down the line in time with the _work-it-work-it-work-it-work-it _of the incessant whip-birds sitting plump and smug in their fleeting canopy, remembering the satisfying, cracking depth of his own voice in contrast, his old Nord blood dragging it down even at that age; remembering the gurgling eagerness of his stomach for his mother's hot curried veal when the dusk shook out its shooing veil over their sweat-helmeted heads, and then the warm gravidity of accomplishment and plump-stomached satisfaction when he had eaten his well-deserved fill; remembering the wet breeze of night over his slut's silk bed through the window of his tiny room's soil-bricked walls, swirling musky and moist round the rice-papered lanterns that let his single eye, voracious despite the exhausted fullness of his ody, devour again and again his limited library.

He was back on the land that had birthed him, and his father, and his father's father, and his father's father's father, where their ancestral cottage rose up from the ochre earth itself over the sprawling fields, where the air hung in one's lungs, saturated with potency, where the river rolled its rusty bulky around the high-banked borders of their home, cutting ever deeper into the slick orange soil, _where the rice warbled hum-flutterby'd songs in the sultry wind, effervescing rainbows of pollination across the hexagonal paddies, _where the wheat rumpled golden wrinkles against the verdant vegetation of the forest backdrop, where the frogs belched and chirped, choir-coordinated, from shelves of fungus and tortoise-shuttles, _where the rains came like warm honey from the sweating skies, plink-plunking down in leaf-broken tumble, where the bold bellow of tiger and leopard broke the sweet suspension of the nights in every season of sex, _where the ewes cried lonely at dusk outside his window, bleating blatant distress until he bent his belly across the sill to stroke their silky ears and shove saved grain granules into their greedy mouths, where the humble moth-shrines hunched on their single hill, safe from flood as their house was not, _where the boney arms of my inheritance's promise gleamed with lunar lustre in the frond-filtered gloom and my home's honey combed silken sleeves frothed in the wind and shattered the sun, where the dawn-bright soil squelches and sticks between your toes, selfsame as skin, where the land's love pulses beneath the surface, blood thick and ever-steady, feeding us, favoring us, cradling us, that orange earth, that ancient land, that embracing soil, oh, that clasping, tangling, strangling soil..._

His voice slipped slowly into silence, and Jon slid back into the here and the now and the him even more slowly. He had no sense of what he had said, only of what he had seen; he did not know how much he had shared. But all of his edaphomancers - except Cehseekye, who gazed at him more with curious perplexity than entrancement - were watching him with dreamy, absent sensation and swirls clouding their eyes and tugging at their lips, and somehow he knew that neither could they have said whether or not he had spoken in words or simply transported them directly to Cyrodiil; that they had sunk deep, deep within the tawny horizons of his profile and seen Cyrodiil as he had seen it. Ilandra let out a long, satisfied sigh, but said nothing. No one did; they just stared, entranced and trapped in his very soul.

Jon laughed awkwardly under the attention as he came back to himself enough to realize its strangeness - its specialness, rather. He rubbed the back of his neck.

"Ah, I have been talking far too much, I think," he said. "An interview is all fine, but there's no reason for me to go on about myself so excessively. I'm here to learn, not bore you all with my nostalgia." Odd. A few days earlier, he would have said that there was no nostalgia in him for his father's old farm.

"You are here to learn edaphomancy, Jon," Tsirelsyn answered, his voice a smooth stream of perfect peace. "To learn edaphomancy is to learn love, to learn entanglement and paedogenesis. To practice our craft is to entangle the world. And sometimes it is the world you must entangle within yourself, rather than yourself within the world, to accomplish that. You must give, as well as receive. And, Jon, you have just done that most beautifully."

And this time, the human held the elf's softly frank stare in silent acknowledgement and appreciation, single eye smiling softly. He held it until Tsirelsyn's lips curled up a tight grin, and the Son spoke again.

"But that feat can be tiring, I know. We will give you a reprieve, I think. Interview adjourned!"

"Aye, interview adjourned," Ilandra echoed softly, smiling down at Jon. "We have learned enough to be going on with, I think." Jon shook his head, grinning down at his empty plate.

"Yes, yes, we've tortured the poor boy long enough," agreed Telendil, leaning back from the table with his hands folded over his stomach. He looked to his wife, snugged into a tight, limb-folded line in her chair and peering musingly down, the sour twist at last gone from her lips. "What of you, my love? What does tomorrow hold for us? I moved the hives like you said, by the way."

The womer glanced up at her thick-built husband, and there was a sudden blaze of sweet fondness in her green eyes. She unfolded her arms, smiling, and scooted her chair closer to his so as to press her lips to his plump-pressed cheek and lean her sleek head against his shoulder.

"I saw that," she said, rubbing her cheek on his arm. "You are so wonderfully reliable." Jon had to press his lips tightly together to suprress a smirk as Telendil tossed him a wink and mouthed 'the ox.' His wife went on, oblivious. "Tomorrow I will deploy the acarina on the south slope's upper sector, I think; I saw a thrips there two days past. Apart from that - well, one of the armoudae lines is in molt, so there are the humidifiers to maintain and the nests to clean, and a few of the mermecolions have the sooty cerci mold, so I'll probably have to clear that out, too." Telendil nodded sagely, unsurprised and understanding.

Jon, though, was a bit surprised. He spoke up, a tad more polite and careful in tone than he would have been with one of the edaphomancers.

"You are still working?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow.

Paralon stirred slightly, opening eyes that had slipped close with the comfort of her husband's arm. She blinked at Jon, and smiled reservedly. "Yes, of course I am. It is not only you soil types who know how to properly apply passion to purpose, you know. Many years I have lived, but that doesn't mean I'm about to surrender my job to the youths." She bit her lip and wrinkled her nose playfully.

Jon smiled back. "No, of course not, I didn't mean that at all. You misunderstand me. I assure you, there was no thought of age in my mind; you are a flower in finest bloom. I'm just surprised, that in your particular _condition _of blooming beauty, you maintain your diligence." The air drew taught with the sudden pull of four indrawn breaths, but neither Jon nor Paralon noticed the sudden stillness.

"What?" the elf replied with a confused, but pleased, little laugh. "Why? What does beauty have to do with it?" She noticed the horrified, eye-popping stares of the edaphomancers, then, and frowned questioningly at Tsirelsyn - but Jon, to his misfortune, did not.

"No no," he went on, swift with awkwardness, "not with beauty. It is your condition to which I refer." He paused, dancing for delicacy, and the moment hung frozen in horror. And then he let the fatal words drop. "I mean... well, you are expecting delivery soon, are you not?"

She was almost unchanged, for a moment, just staring curiously at the human, as though she did not understand his meaning. But then her eyes began to swell like blisters, their pupils swallowing all trace of color, her mouth to contract tighter and tighter and whiter and whiter, her ears to glow bright and brighter scarlet, and Jon knew he had ruined his run.

"_You dare," _she said in a tremulous whisper, her wire-thin lips barely moving, "you _dare _to remind me of that? You? You human, you cur, you infinitesimal speck of unimportance, you peritrichous ape! You dare to remind me of my sorrow?!"

Her voice wound more loud and shrill with each word. A hush rippled across the room; a collective swiveling and pricking knife-narrow ears. Jon's face flushed as red as his wine, hot as a forge.

"Apologiesapologiesapologies, madame," he whispered swiftly. "I did not know - I did not understand!"

"Pah!" Her cry squawked out over the table, Her eyes were huge, white-ringed, mad, her mouth just a gash in the blood-taut skin, the tips of her ears aquiver. "Of _course _you do not understand," she said, and her voice dropped suddenly into a harsh, mocking whisper. She leaned toward him over the table, spitting her Tamrielic words like venom. "Of course you do not understand, you infant, you human! Your people are unparalleled in their cruelty to children. You do not even remember your mother. So do not speak to me of my 'condition!' You do not know what it is like to contain another, to be contained by another in love so perfect, and then - inevitably - and then - and _then -_"

And then she was crying softly into her long hands, all fury and venom washed from her face by a crumpling flood of sorrow. Telendil's thick arms folded gently around her, and his head bent to hers, murmuring softly, comfortingly. Jon stared, catatonic. No one else made a sound. No one else even moved, until Telendil had scooped his clinging, crying, pregnant Paralon into his arms and against his stalwart chest and had borne her away through the double rosewood doors. Only then did life begin to creep amongst them once more; subdued voices, clinking cutlery, and soft, sad songs.

But there was none of that at Jon's table. The edaphomancers sat frozen, still, as catatonic as Jon himself. Tears trickled down Tsirelsyn's smooth, high-boned cheeks. Ilandra and Rumarene stared blankly down at the table, lashes shining with dew. Only Cehseekye's eyes were dry - and they stared at Jon with such intent, such unwavering focus that he wondered numbly whether she would attack him as she had done in the carriage. But she did not; she merely stared, perfect face stiff and stoic as ever, and Jon forgot her in the hot rush of his self recrimination.

He stood, after a time, when he could bear the rejecting silence of Tsirelsyn and the others no longer. He snatched up his iron goblet in a trembling hand and wove a hot, awkward way out of the cypress table's spiral, avoiding every eye that turned his way. He escaped to the end of the room, where the smoothly warped wood crashed wave-tiers out from the wall to form the huge fireplaces mantel and the only sounds were the crackle of popping gas and the ghost-roar of the flames. Yes, a gas flame; each tongue fed by a single curlicued glass pipe like those of the chandeliers above. Wrapped up together as they were, it seemed a ball of flame roiled on the hearth without substrate or source, burning on itself alone.

Jon knew that he could not possibly have avoided the disaster. It was natural to speak of a woman's pregnancy, if done politely. He could not have known of this strange Alinorian taboo. But, still - he could not help coaling himself with the damage his blunder had done to his relations with the elves. All that comradery and comfortable conversation they had had - all gone, gone in a single mistake. They sat in silence and tears, and he stood alone in ignorance.

He sighed heavily, and took a sip of his wine, staring down into the flickering flames. it was not irreparable; long years of diplomacy had taught him how to recoup from this sort of stumble. But it would cost him time, and comfort for a little while. They would not be so easy with him for at least several weeks, he estimated. And it had utterly ruined this night, for certain. Ah well, though. The pitfalls of ambassadorial work, he supposed, and took another sip of wine.

Footfalls whispered behind him. He twitched his head a bare fraction, and caught sight of a tall, tawny figure out of the corner of his eye. One of the edaphomancers, come to rectify his ignorance. Probably Tsirelsyn. He swirled his goblet, and stared down into the flames without acknowledging the mer's presence.

When the voice came, though, it was not Tsirelsyn's deep gong-thrumming boom. It was low, smooth, and rich, and underneath that... raw, like scraped flesh.

"They mourn in sympathy, not censure," Cehseekye said quietly. Jon started, glancing quickly over to confirm her peach-lidded profile above him, gazing down into the fire. "You touched a thread that resonates in us all."

"My apologies," Jon murmured deeply. "I did not know."

She turned those steady, heavy-lidded eyes directly on him for a long moment. "I know," she said simply, and turned back to the fire.

"What is so upsetting in it?"

"That which is upsetting in anything," she answered. "Remembered sorrow. A reminder of the inevitability and permanence of separation. The injustice none of us should be forced to endure."

Jon nodded slowly, though he did not understand. There was no point in pressing; he could tell that she would not share in more detail. So he said nothing, and let the water-popping sizzle of the flames hack its song.

But after a long span of silence, Cehseekye spoke.

"Paralon is pregnant," she said bluntly. "She is too close to the sorrow to think clearly of it, and her body is too occupied to allow lease for much self control. She would not have reacted to your words as she did had she been her normal self. None here would - although some in the urbanities might." She paused, and then turned to face him fully; her eyes snared his without effort. "Regardless, it would be wise if you did not mention birth, pregnancy, or sex again while you are here."

Jon nodded briefly, lost in webs of black and gold. "Understood."

She held him a moment longer, and then turned on her bare, golden heel to leave. Jon swirled his goblet beneath his nose, gathering his thoughts back from the foggy haze of her gaze. But she had paused next to him, facing away, and suddenly she spoke again in a voice of spring water broken past the crusted earth.

"Do not worry, Jon," she whispered. "We are only sad. Sad in a way that you cannot understand, in a way that we have to leave you to be. But we will return. Do not worry." She touched his elbow gently, and was gone.

Jon's heart germinated.


End file.
